There's tons of potential in companies for IT innovation, whether small- or large-scale. It's proven by those, even tiny firms, that act on it. Most companies act against it on top of under-funding, under-staffing, and over-stretching their IT staff. That combination causes the effect you describe. It's not inherent in any way. If it was, examples I described wouldn't exist.
It takes a lot of work, and it feels quite different than the luxury of overt R&D and an emphasis on creating tools. We still mostly have to keep the development of tools to an as-needed basis and just take those opportunities to put an eye on the future. It's a delicate balance.
So to me the GP is not wrong when saying that these companies like Facebook have a serious luxury. That's the luxury to repeatedly experiment and fail with little relative consequence to the business. The rest of us can't afford to spend nearly as much time or make nearly as many mistakes.
So, there's certainly a huge gap between most companies and Facebook. Yet, even allocating one person, day, 15% time, etc. to try or build some new things might have quite some results over thousands to hundreds of thousands of companies. I'm just arguing companies could be putting in significantly more effort even without a true R&D department or luxurious business model. Past that, mileage varies from company to company esp with their circumstances.
The thing is whether they realize it or not every company is now has to be a software company, if they aren't then a software company will put them out of business within 10 years.