IMO, everyone is getting more creative since scaling doesn't help performance as much anymore. Moore's Law allowed chip makers to lean on physics to make existing architectures faster. Now the plethora of accelerators (risky new architectures) is proof that physics isn't doing as much of the heavy lifting.
Back in 2013 or so HotChips had a presentation from some dude from DARPA about chip development at and after the end of Moore's law scaling. It probably was the most prophetic tech talk I've ever seen. Your comment could essentially be a quote straight out of it.
Anyway, for me the rub comes in with the fact that historically it's taken a really long time for mainstream software to exploit new instruction sets or architectures.
To be fair, a lot of people had that prediction. But DARPA has definitely been ahead of the game in most research.
More importantly, Dennard scaling has basically already dropped dead since around ~40-28nm, although we did get a "pseudo-continuation" in the form of FinFETs and friends.
