Exactly. Gordon in the Rise and Fall of American Growth spells out the details of what real innovation looks like. Peter Drucker used to make about the same point, putting the emphasis on the 60 years leading up to 1914, which he considered the most innovative 60 years in human history: photography, telephones, radio, electricity, the combustion engine and therefore cars and trucks, airplanes, the modern textile dye industry, the oil industry, the first plastics, mass production of cleaning solutions, sulfa drugs, the modern steel industry and therefore cheap steel, and therefore skyscrapers and larger boats, the wholesale reinvention of mathematics starting with group theory discovered or re-discovered from Gauss in the 1870s and then followed by the evolution towards set theory, not to mention the tensor calculus, Boolean logic, and statistics becoming part of science, Max Plank but also Albert Einstein, etc. The list is really too long.

At a slightly larger scale, there was what some historians refer to as a "secular boom" from the 1700s to the 1970s, and then since the 1970s we've seen the onset of what some call The Great Stagnation.

How this ends and what comes next is anyone's guess.