Oh, sure! You won't hear me say that no progress at all was accomplished over the past 20 years :-) What's clear to me though is that we are well beyond the point of diminishing returns. The footprint is the very physical limiting factor for how much light/SNR can be gathered, and this has been stagnant for many years (but not two decades, indeed). Old tricks (like pixel binning, image stacking, exposure bracketing, …) are also commonplace, and to be fair, are still fine by me. Where we might disagree is that what comes beyond that (like Samsung outright slapping a HD picture of moon when you point your sensor at it) contributes to "narrowing the gap".

Interestingly, I may be part of a small but growing niche: https://www.lux.camera/introducing-process-zero-for-iphone/