I think it is the consumer IoT space which struggles for usefulness. In industry, IoT allows agriculture to use less water and get more yield, as well as monitoring civil infrastructure (roads, watermains, bridges, etc).
Yes, an embedded system could get the soil conditions on a farm, but what did it do with that data? How was it made available to an end user.
So, I don't disagree that embedded systems have been in existence for a long time, but I think what we're seeing is the equivalent of moving from Compuserve to the WWW, and I think at the time, many people would have said that all the world-wide web was doing was making the information available through Compuserve's forums and networks distributed. But in reality, it was the early stages of a massive sea-change in how the technology is used.