Honestly while I agree, I do think that Tesla did advance the adoption, purely by forcing it into the market so boldly with the model S. Other manufacturers were receiving government bailouts and messing around with smaller displacement city cars around 2010-2011, and brands like Karma started popping up along side Tesla and made a bit of disruptive noise to the big players.

I honestly don't think we'd have seen the same level of EV adoption by now if not for Tesla. But then I don't really know how to quantify it for arguments sake.