That's the thing with exponentials, they are very hard to predict. We know that in general, exponential growth is unsustainable, and there has to be an inflection point, but where? It is usually difficult to know until the last moment, and even a small difference in time on where you predict the inflection point is can make a massive difference.

Look at COVID for instance, not the first novel coronavirus infection, it only took days to go from "maybe it is like the other ones that infected a few thousand people" to "everyone on the planet will get it", because the start of the curve looks the same.