The deeper point isn’t to compare mores law to all new technology but rather to consider how long it takes to get close to some fundamental limit. Early engines had horrible efficiency but that rapidly increased over time up to a reasonable fraction of hypothetical limits.
You see this all over the place, modern guns aren’t multiple orders of magnitude improvements over guns built 100 years ago. But they are orders of magnitude better than the absolute earliest guns ever built.
So, when looking at a prototype the question isn’t can it be improved but by how much can it be improved.
Which is why Moore's Law was a thing for so long: early transistors were so many orders of magnitude off of fundamental limits that the improvements could keep up an exponential pace for a long while.
Moores law is still a thing, it’s just that the “jumps” between progression along the curve are longer. It will eventually reach infinity, but that’ll be awhile.
Aren't there also issues with some fundamental limits affecting the value of increased transistor density? Like we can cram the transistors in but the benefits aren't the same as before?
“Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
That’s a common misunderstanding, you can read the original quotes but to summarize:
The observation is named after Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel (and former CEO of the latter), who in 1965 posited a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit,[a] and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade. In 1975, looking forward to the next decade, he revised the forecast to doubling every two years, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 41%. While Moore did not use empirical evidence in forecasting that the historical trend would continue, his prediction held since 1975 and has since become known as a "law".
The speed of processors actually increased much faster than the number of transistors on a chip until recently. Smaller transistors used to mean both faster switching speeds and the ability to get more done per instruction cycle. The difference between the days of a 4 bit Intel 4004 and a 32Bit 486 was vast.
You see this all over the place, modern guns aren’t multiple orders of magnitude improvements over guns built 100 years ago. But they are orders of magnitude better than the absolute earliest guns ever built.
So, when looking at a prototype the question isn’t can it be improved but by how much can it be improved.