People landed rockets vertically in real life for decades beforethen.

What SpaceX did was to put a second stage on top of that, scale it up, and make it automatically guided. You're going to have a very, very hard time arguing that this is anywhere even near the level of innovation that NASA or the Soviet space program achieved in a third of the company's lifetime.

As for the stagnation in space, sure. That's the issue with government programs in our current paradigm, they are heavy and the best course of action is seldom taken. Also, for some reason the US has an aversion for SoEs, so NASA, for ideological reasons, wouldn't have been allowed to make their own reusable launch vehicle and make a profit out of it.