That is just mainstream reporting.
If one actually went and read the paper referred or what the context was. It was always the same thing. It was all about the economics, all the way back from early 90s. We cant do x node because it would be too expensive to sustain it at a node every two years.
Smartphone era ( Referring to Post iPhone launch ) essentially meant we ship an additional ~2 Billions Pocket computer every year including Tablet. That is 5x the most optimistic projection to traditional PC model at 400M / year. ( Which we never reached ). And that is ignoring the Server market, Network Market, GPU market, AI Market etc. In terms of transistor and revenue or profits the whole TAM ( Total Addressable Market ) went up at least 10x more than those projection. Which is essentially what scale us from 22nm to now 3nm, and all the way to 2nm and 1.4nm. And my projection of 1nm by 2030 as well. I even wrote on HN in ~2015 I have a hard time to see how we could sustain this post 3nm. At the time when trillion dollar company was thought to be impossible.
On the other side of things, the cost projection to next node ( e.g 2nm ), and next next node (e.g 1.4nm ) was always higher than what its turns out. As with any large project management it is was better to ask and project more in case shit hits the fan. ( Intel 10nm ) But every time TSMC has executed so well.
So as you can see there is a projection mismatch at both ends. Which is why the clear sign of progress coming to end keeps being wrong.
> and can expect 1000X improvement in the years to come at least.
I just want to state that this figure keeps being throw around. It was Jim Keller comparing at the time Intel 14nm ( Which is somewhere close to TSMC N10 ) to hypothetical physics limit. At 3nm we are at least 4x pass that. Depending on how you want to measure it we could reach less than 100x by 2030.
AI trend could carries us forward to may be 2035. But we dont have another product category like iPhone. Server at hyperscaler are already at a scale growth is slowing. We will again need to substantially lower the development cost of leading node ( My bet is on the AI / Software side ) and some product that continues to grow the TAM. May be Autonomous Vehicles will finally be a thing by 2030s ? ( I doubt it but just throwing in some ides ).