Hot take, the elephant in the room is that the firehose of easy discoveries has run dry in most physical sciences. Accordingly, the academic community is probably an order of magnitude oversized, but there will be little incentive to scale itself down. As a result you see an academic machine idling.
Invention is a slow process filled with periods where progress feels like it has stalled. Then, we have a breakthrough, sometimes major, other times incremental. Seeing it in hindsight is easy, living through it is hard as we measure our experiences in seconds.
