No, doesn't mean they shouldn't be called out.

Lee is in the ironic position of having created "The Marvel Universe" without actually creating most of the elements of the Marvel Universe. There's a lot to be said for taking  a couple great and a bunch of fair-to-middling characters and nurturing an editorial environment and tone that allowed them to act as a single universe and appealing brand.

Unfortunately, comic fans don't value that kind of creativity.

I believe that Lee did more than write the dialogue. He helped shape the ideas.

Everything I've read on the subject leads me to believe that Lee was absolutely involved in the creation of many of Marvel's key characters. Let's take Spider-Man for example: the very name Spider-Man was Lee's idea (admittedly, almost certainly inspired by the pulp hero The Spider) and so too was the idea of making him a teenager, rather than an adult, which was more usual for "long underwear characters". Plus, obviously it was Lee's scripting that gave the character his angst ridden personality.

Ditko obviously contributed a ton of design stuff, such as Spidey's costume, web-shooters, spider signal etc, and Jack Kirby also had some input, such as having Peter Parker orphaned and living with an elderly Aunt and Uncle (if memory serves). I think I'm right in saying that Kirby actually drew some pages for the first Spider-Man comic, but Lee rejected them as looking too "superhero-y", which is why Ditko was given the job as artist.

I also kinda suspect that Kirby played up his own involvement in the character's creation in later decades and somewhat tried to minimise and downplay both Lee and Ditko's involvement. However, the few interviews with Stan and Steve from the 60s and early 70s, when memories were still fresh, barely mention Kirby at all in connection with Spider-Man's creation.

Irrespective of all that though, it's clear to anyone who cares to read up on and research about the character's history that Spider-Man was created by three people and that it was almost certainly Lee and Ditko who did the bulk of the heavy lifting.

So yeah...Lee definitely had a hand in creating characters. The idea that it was all Kirby, Ditko, Romita etc just doesn't hold water.

Had a hand in and was the sole creator, as he claimed and Disney now endorses, are two very different things. I, and most of those I have read who are trying to get the record straight do not say Lee did nothing. They are saying he had a secondary roll in many of the characters and did not create all of the heroes, as he continued to claim.

One merely has to look at the time line of what Lee created before Kirby and Ditko came to Marvel, what they had created and what was created after they joined to see who was the driving force in creating these.

As I have said, soap opera dialog that caught on with the readers, being editor and keeping it all together and connected, great PR man. But the creator of all those Marvel superheroes and then getting artists to draw his ideas...Bullshit.

I consider the relationship between Stan and the artists to be like Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson. The artists might have come up with the look, but you need a good writer to fill in details and motivations. Kirby created the Silver Surfer but didn’t flesh out the origin the way Silver Surfer #1 did. look at Kirby’s Fourth world stuff and you can see he created many characters that he didn’t develop further. After Ditko left, Spider-man took off in sales. Ditko had a black and white world and would never have endorsed the nuance that arrived after issue #39.