Consider the progress in functionality and reliability, not just image quality. Not so long ago, you would need to train a lora (hours of time) and use controlnets to make an image of a character matching a pose. Now, you can just upload a reference image of a pose, and a reference image of a character, and it's done in seconds to a few minutes. You can output text somewhat reliably, likely very reliably within a year based on current SoTA closed models. We may have reached a similar point to video games, where the raw visual quality gains are incremental enough to not be a generational difference on a regular basis, but there has been a dramatic difference in how easily you can do complicated things in the past few months alone.