I remember back in the early 2000s when people thought we were running out of steam on the advancements front. This was roughly around the time when CPU clocks stopped getting faster. Pentium hit 3GHz in 2005, Intel Core Ultra 5 performance cores are generally around this exact speed 20 years later.

Since at least the 640kb quip, betting against progress or the appetite for progress has been a losing bet.

Honestly post 2005 things did slow down dramatically for typical single core workloads.

In the late 90s and early 2000s the mantra was "why waste time optimizing your software? By the time you're done the next gen of CPUs will have made up the difference."

Now the increase is more about moving to GPUs and power efficiency etc. We still have increases, but the rate of speedup has slowed down a lot.