"If a case hinges on a fact that is proven only by information that is in the hands of, e.g., Verizon, then yes, law enforcement requires the cooperation of that tech company to gather evidence."
...and if the company lacks that evidence because the police took too long to ask for it, then the case falls apart. So what? Our justice system is not meant to minimize the number of false negatives, it is meant to minimize the number of false positives.
"The police did a fine enough job gathering evidence before technology leapfrogged ahead of them?"
Read the context; the police did a fine enough job of gathering wiretap evidence before CALEA. The phone had been around and in common use for decades before CALEA, and even in the years leading up to CALEA the police had gathered enormous amounts of evidence from wiretaps and pen registers. It was just harder, because prior to CALEA the police had to actually step away from their desks and install a machine to perform a wiretap -- how terribly inconvenient!
"You see power creep in law enforcement; I see power creep in everybody."
Only if you ignore the fact that the police are more powerful today than they were when our parents were growing up. You are not witnessing power creep, you are witnessing a possible minute change in the balance of power between people and the government. Instead of calling up a phone company and demanding a wiretap, the police might have to show up in a data center with a rack-mountable interception device, in the worst case.