It helps your career to cite the head of AI in Facebook and the former head of Google. Not so much some academician who worked in the 1970s in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan.
I believe the Schmidhuber-ignoring (according to him) began before those two were at Google/Meta. But, I suppose NYU/Bell Labs and U-Toronto will be more likely to be cited than somewhere in Munich or Switzerland...
The location where scientists reside should be irrelevant - at best the venue where it was published should matter (I can understand that some obscure journals in other languages may be skipped in favor of more well-known (ACM/IEEE/ACL/...) English language conferences or journals), and it's not that Schmidhuber was hiding from the mainstream outlets.
In the age of globalization, it's getting harder to justify ignoring anything out there.
