If the way of thinking is so new, then why should we expect to find stories about it?

To quote from the guy this story was about, "there is nothing new under the sun". At least nothing directly related to our wetware. So we should expect that every now and then people stumbled upon a "good way of thinking", and when they did, the results were good. They might just not manage to identify what exactly made the method good, and to replicate it.

Also, as MaoShan said, this is kind of Proto-Bayes, 101 thinking. What we now have is this, but systematically improved over many iterations.

(that is, that it was known N years ago but didn't take over the world)?

"Taking over the world" is a complex mix of effectiveness, popularity, luck and cultular factors. You can see this a lot in the domain of programming languages. With ways of thinking it is even more difficult, because - as opposed to programming languages - most people don't learn them explicitly and don't evaluate them based on results/"features".