I get the frustration of not seeing eg the next laser or transistor from a modern Bell Labs - but for a few hundred dollars an Indian teenager can build an app which could be used by a billion people using only free and open source technologies. There are so many little inventions and contributions that needed to happen for that (and many other miracles) to be possible. The physical hardware frontier has definitely matured since Bell was at their peak but we continue to make rapid progress on the software/digital front.

What is a Transistor but a smaller, more efficient, much cheaper to make Vacuum tube (in a more limited way, it's only a simple amplifier).

That path of development lead through the 'Moores Law' era to a point where with present use of physics and material science we have run out of going smaller. Maybe there's some new fundamental breakthrough that would unlock something groundbreaking... However it's going to take a lot of hard exploration of fruitless problem space to stumble across such a lead.

In the short term, in parallel, the best thing for everyone with what we do have is to refine further. Find ways of doing things with more environmentally friendly and cost effective processes. That work isn't glamorous or very profitable though, so it'd be better to fund it as a public commons / national benefit work and ensure it's exploited as an international competitive advantage (possibly shared with allied nations for their similar investments).