I'm not a hardware guy, but my guess would be evolution of radio transceiver tech in the cell space drives improvements downstream in wifi. Better transceivers can pull quality signals from what was noise generations past, its not magic of course, but the speed transceivers can run over copper cable goes up similarly. 1Gbps was a fast cable a while ago, and now we're doing hundreds of gigabits commonly.

Another thing is that features like beamforming and higher QAM, let's say, are going to matter more in ideal scenarios where APs are in their sweet spot relative to clients, and you get to take advantage of high SNRs. Is that going to help when someone buys a Netgear Wifi 7 AP only to flip it upside down behind the couch in their apartment in an environment where 2.4 and even 5 ghz are basically gone from all their neighbors' use? Still, faster data rates mean clients get on and off the air quicker overall, saving airspace and battery if applicable. So, I think there's mainstream and highly specialized features rolling out simultaneously.