Propulsive landing has existed as long as the space industry of course.
> The SpaceX advancement may be more business than tech.
No it really isn't. This is sort of myth people perpetuate because they don't like SpaceX. Fact is, SpaceX did a huge amount of development to actually achieve a really reusable first stage.
Early on data was flowing from NASA to SpaceX, but pretty quickly it was NASA monitoring SpaceX and asking them for data because they simply don't have it. SpaceX had to figure out things like supersonic retropropulsion. The engine SpaceX development achieved things nobody has done before.
People point to a few research projects that thought about some individual things SpaceX did, but those never came even close even as a sum of all of them.
Not so! See Delta Clipper ca. 1996: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z46RiuZvh6c
The SpaceX advancement may be more business than tech. They have a way to thrive without pork contracts paying them to build a new launcher every mission. The fat, complacent, dinosaurs will have trouble dieting down to parity.
In fact, maybe that's why Delta Clipper didn't advance to the next stage: not enough fat milk for contractors!