It is assumed due to the higher knowlege and specialisation level that the world has these days, but such moments of change does not come along very often, and people have always been confident about how there is no way their understanding of the world might be severly lacking in some way. So it might just be that all is as it always has been you just have to look at it using a large enough time frame.

I've heard of a contemporary mathematician who had small contributions and did it as a hobby. The recent article about insect population decrease was possible thanks to data collected by hobbyists too iirc (but ended up written by scholars I guess). I don't know if there are many other examples.