That definitely counts in my book. Milkdrop 2 introduced shader support at a time when GPUs were coming out with increasingly powerful shader support, which was mostly just used for video games, leaving an untapped artistic potential. This potential has been explored by Milkdrop 2 preset authors in astounding ways. I would say they were, for a while, ahead of the general demoscene in terms of crazy shaders.
(Looks like Milkymist doesn't support any of that since it emphasizes open hardware)