When a new technology comes along no one knows what ideas are good and what ideas are bad, so people try a bunch of things and most of them aren't very useful and the few that are become standardized. In the case of UX stuff like visualizations users also learn the grammar of the technology and get used to seeing things done in certain ways, which makes it harder to do things differently.

So basically there's less innovation in data visualization because we mostly figured out how to solve our data visualization problems. If you look at the history of printed visualizations I think you'd find a similar pattern. The only somewhat recent innovation I can think of there is the violin plot, which became possible due to advances in statistics that led to probability distributions becoming more important.

Innovation is never constantly increasing. It usually appears in bursts, and stops around the point that humans don't need it as much, or development hits a ceiling of effort. But it's always slowly simmering. Usually it's research or yak-shaving that, after years, suddenly appears as if out of nowhere as a useful product.

I am hopeful that in my lifetime, the web will die. It's such an insanely stupid application platform. An OS on an OS, in a document reader (which, due to humans' ability to go to any lengths to avoid hard work, literally all new network protocols have to be built on top of).

You want cool visualizations? Maybe don't lock yourself into using a goddamn networked document viewer. Native apps can do literally anything. But here we are, the most advanced lifeforms on the planet, trapped in a cage of our own making.

This basically sums it up:

“Some information will always be best conveyed in a straightforward bar or line chart, particularly for audiences that don’t have time to engage deeply"

Unremarked is that while those examples are visually impressive, they're also unhelpful.

Exactly. I see a lot of graphs and animations that look cool but when you take a closer look, they convey not much information .

The economics don't support innovative web visualizations, a slight engagement boost for a day is the return on investment. If you're lucky it goes viral on social media, but there's far cheaper ways to accomplish that (e.g. inflammatory rhetoric).

MBAs and MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

No doubt due to structural tax changes that changed R&D into OpEx

Quarterly profit over long term growth

Low interest rates.