The rest seem less like breakthroughs and more just improvements as time marches on. Are these really the best examples of breakthroughs that the western world can come up with?
A lot of gamechanging science emerged from cold war. Not only did USSR produce some science, western scientists did not have to jump through hoops all day to get funding - politicians knew falling behind was not an option
The new technology is super exciting though, so lets give the article that. We're hardly so stagnant that a single technological breakthrough is unheard of in the last 50 years and signals an end of stagnancy.
I feel that you're splitting hairs here. The article mentions both in adjacent paragraphs.
And the fact that the vaccine was developed faster was also not a one-off, this is a feature of mRNA vaccines. Future vaccines can be manufactured with the same blueprint by just swapping out the mRNA sequence.