It has a lot of truth to it and it's been making the rounds for well over a decade. Unfortunately, sometimes it can set folks up to feel bad about themselves if what they do doesn't line up well with whatever is in vogue as the boundary of knowledge that's currently being pushed.
There's a _ton_ of value in more pragmatic parts of fields that focus on applications or combining relatively well-know parts of different sub-fields. Those parts of science often don't feel like you're pushing some "boundary". It's more layering on top of, filling in holes, and building up than building "out". Sometimes what you do is to use multiple things that lots of folks already knew, but the people who knew X and the people who knew Y didn't talk to each other, so no one thought about how to combine them. It can also be hard to get papers published because reviewers will consider one part obvious/well-known and the other part irrelevant because they come from one sub-field and not both.
It will often feel like you don't belong because your work doesn't look like these figures. Applied and interdisciplinary fields "feel" different. However, this type of integrative work can be among the most valuable parts of modern research.
Don't feel like what you do has to fit into the "penis pimple model" of science. There's also nothing wrong with pushing some known boundary of a field, either! Both are valid.