Essentially nothing interesting, from the patient's perspective, happened between the time that effective chemotherapy combinations were formulated (60s & 70s) and roughly ten years ago.
More recently, however, there have a surge of approvals in immunotherapy which have turned death sentence diagnoses (e.g. metastatic melanoma) into potentially survivable diseases. The 2 year survival rate for stage IV melanoma has increased from ~5-8% to 20-40%. The tools used to achieve this increase in survival are broadly applicable to other cancers and have been achieving gains in survival for lung cancer, bladder cancer, &c. More importantly, immunotherapy research is just getting started and there are lots of promising approaches (personalized vaccines, engineered T-cells, oncolytic viruses, more interesting routes of immune modulation). Many of these approaches seem to synergize. So, treatment has improved dramatically for many indications and looks like it will continue improving. There are some cancers which a patient is still unlikely to survive (pancreatic, GBM), but the industry's output of useful drugs is definitely not stagnant.
Now, the pricing of those drugs once approved is a whole different problem...