Many, if not most when taken to pedantic conclusions, seemingly-superlinear phenomena are logistic “s-curves”[0]. Even if you’re taking over the entire physical universe, eventually you run out of some limiting growth factor like “total addressable market” or “particles in the the reachable universe.” This isn’t a purely nitpicky point - epidemics and “viral ideas” initially have little interference like this, but when they grow enough they run into interference from immune or previously infected individuals being much harder to infect. Tiktok for example surely had an exponential growth phase among the 14-24 demographic in the US, but by now everyone in that demographic has at least heard of it, and if it did near total penetration into that demographic it’d eventually be limited by the actual number of people able to use their app.
There are also log returns, which look superlinear (not really exponential technically) but eventually taper. For example, a skilled aerospace engineer could probably make a crappy paper plane for $0.1, a really good one for $100. But for $10000 it probably wouldn’t be that much better than the $100 if at all. Plenty of things are like that, it’s called diminishing returns…
Finally, there are definitely quadratic curves in real life. If you’re looking at communications it’s everywhere, usually as an upper bound or worst case. Additional leaf connections may have their diminishing marginal utility countered by the fact that existing and new connections become incrementally more valuable as the network grows.