This frequent question stems from several misconceptions:

1. Abu Hurayrah’s actual number of hadiths.

2. Abu Hurayrah’s source(s) of Prophetic transmission.

3. The nature of transmission during the Prophetic era. https://twitter.com/Abin____/status/1252493408242929665

Regarding the first point, I briefly touched on it in this thread:

(I’m also independently aggregating AH’s authentic transmission, and it seems to be generally within the ball-range of the figure mentioned here.) https://mobile.twitter.com/AbdullahBiqai/status/1251410111140159488

Regarding the second point, it comes without a surprise that smaller Sahabi’s, like AH, also acquired knowledge from more senior companions of the Prophet.

So AH continued to collect Prophetic traditions from other Sahabi’s following the Prophet’s death.