energy density hasn't really changed for 15 years, price dropped a lot though, but price drop has also paused recently. There is no telling if any progress will be made or not. Maybe! Maybe not.
Volumetric numbers from the DOE suggest it went from 55 Wh/l in 2008 to 450 in 2020, which a compound interest calculator tells me is about 20% per year. Which is an awful lot.
Physics world says 80Wh/kg when Sony introduced them in 1991, and 300 today (although someone above said 270 is what ships), which looks like about 5.1%. But the lab experiment numbers are substantially more than that https://physicsworld.com/a/lithium-ion-batteries-break-energ... and shows that the exponential curve was visible back in about 2014. These of course have little to do with production numbers. The bigger the breakthrough the longer it takes to commercialize (or the more watered down it becomes to be commercialized). That was the wisdom when Wall Street was interested in new battery companies.
5% means every 14 years power doubles. We've been flirting with electric vehicles at least that long.
I am quite certain they are just doing alchemy and have tricked us all (it is of course well known that chemE’s are actually the cleverest type of engineer).
It's the same thing with many techs. In the 70's we thought we would run out of oil by 2000, and a lot of asshats in the 80's and 90's crowed about how stupid those so-called experts were.
What happened in the 80's and 90's was ground sensing radar found more oil, horizontal drilling found ways to access more of what was there, and zeolites saw widespread use as a catalyst to increase the amount of gas and diesel recovered from a barrel of oil. And over time production of zeolites made that process work better and better. It's very much like when Apple went to non-replaceable batteries. Battery life doubled in that model because 3 different parts of the problem got improvements. Density, volume, and power management all contributed almost 30% each.
Between "Oh Shit" and "Told Ya", we could produce twice as much fossil fuel as we knew how to do at the time. The same will happen with Lithium. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Replace.