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When a field is young, it is simpler to make important discoveries, so in that sense, science is (obviously) getting harder.

But most of the graphs can be explained by the sheer number of papers being published.

Academics have the perverse incentive to publish as many papers as possible, instead of discovering as many interesting things as possible, because items published is way easier to measure than real progress made.

Therefore there is a significant paper inflation problem. People might today write 10 papers with LPUs (least publishable unit) with stuff that would have been a single technical report 30 years back.

This is much worse than it sounds, because it affects productivity significantly in subtle ways: it takes effort to publish those 10 papers, it takes effort to read up and review the 10x papers of others, and it takes time to think about LPUs instead of concentrating on the bigger picture.

Unfortunately, due to the way the research system is set up, it is not likely things will improve.