During covid almost every prediction model like that exploded, everything went out of distribution really fast. In your sense we've been doing "CL" for a decade or more. It can also be cheap if you use smaller models.

But true CL is the ability to learn out of distribution information on the fly.

The only true solution I know to continual learning is to completely retrain the model from scratch with every new example you encounter. That technically is achievable now but it also is effectively useless.