This effect clearly exists. It suffices to check how physics and math were expressed in the papers that discovered them and how they are currently represented to notice that sometimes organizing knowledge in the right framework and simple notational changes can be sufficient to power up our ability to make new advances.

Question is, are we dedicating enough effort to this endeavors? Is rewriting known math under a different guise sufficient to survive the publish or perish attrition? And will these efforts keep returning results?

I suspect the answer is no to the first two questions, and I don't know the answer to the third.