One other aspect I think it omitted, likely to balance brevity with scope, is about standard deviations.
When you only have the most rich and privileged doing a sport (e.g. travelling to summit mountains) the "best" will be selected from a relatively small pool of candidates. As an activity gains popularity, and as more people have the means to pursue it, the pool of people for "best" grows and it's no surprise that the max of the distribution increases.
There world's population has grown 2x since 1957 when El Capitan was first submitted. The number of people doing fitness in their free time, I'd suspect is up 10x or 100x. This is double true for activities like Chess or Olympic sports where nation states have started searching for talent in wider and wider ways.
I think the main innovation is actually climbing gyms and their popularity, and I'm surprised they weren't talked about in the article. For instance, Alex Honnold replicated many of the difficult moves of Freerider in indoor gyms, which makes it logistically possible to train far more often and intensely. It also serves to further democratize the sport because you don't need the unlimited funds to travel to these spots in the middle of nowhere.
The campus board was only invented in 1988 by Wolfgang Güllich while he was training for Action Directe. Now there's one hanging in every gym in the world.
And I think Lynn Hill has said that one of the things that made her first free ascent of the Nose possible was new climbing gyms, that let her train more intensively than was possible before.
So yeah, as the sport grows we also get more gyms, which further grows the pool of potential record breakers to those who can't travel as much.
One other aspect I think it omitted, likely to balance brevity with scope, is about standard deviations.
When you only have the most rich and privileged doing a sport (e.g. travelling to summit mountains) the "best" will be selected from a relatively small pool of candidates. As an activity gains popularity, and as more people have the means to pursue it, the pool of people for "best" grows and it's no surprise that the max of the distribution increases.
There world's population has grown 2x since 1957 when El Capitan was first submitted. The number of people doing fitness in their free time, I'd suspect is up 10x or 100x. This is double true for activities like Chess or Olympic sports where nation states have started searching for talent in wider and wider ways.