it's only a temporary extension before the exponential starts stagnating

In Little Science, Big Science Derek J de Solla Price does a great job talking about stagnation of exponential scientific growth curves. In general, an exponential growth curve must flatten at some point. He did things like look at the number of scientists in relation to the population. A quote:

It is clear that we cannot go up another two orders of magnitude as we have climbed the last five. If we did, we should have two scientists for every man, woman, child, and dog in the population, and we should spend on them twice as much money as we had. Scientific doomsday is therefore less than a century distant. -Derek J De Solla Price

It's been years since I read it, (and it's a good 50 years old) but I remember it was a good book, that was one of the founders of scientometrics. I would definitely recommend.