Another data point: look at the number of submissions to Neurips, ICLR, etc. Now, I agree that a submission does not by itself imply groundbreaking resesarch, but the fact that people are able to try out/vet ideas much faster now makes a difference.

In my own work, I've found that it's much faster to brainstorm with a frontier model like Opus. I'll have an idea and be able to get a working implementation and try it out on toy problems within O(minutes), instead of O(weeks) earlier.