I think it boils down to we will hit a wall, but we don't know exactly when we'll hit it. (and how hard, chances are that higher-hanging-fruit refinements will make the transition to stagnancy so gradual that we may not notice at all)

A jump from "all past predictions failed" to "and so will all future predictions" seems rather bold to me. In the end it's like a somewhat upended variation of the "x decades to practical fusion" thing where we all hope that the old joke that x might be a natural constant is eventually proven wrong.

Well, the main direction of refinements at this point seem to be around composable/heterogeneous computing where we basically have a lot of hardware optimized for specific workloads and throw the complexity at the software people. i.e. now deal with GPUs, DPUs, FPGAs, xCPUs, etc. instead of (largely) just a standardized set of CPU instructions.