As I said, this was just off the top of my head without any Google assists. I suspect at least part of this idea goes back to Popper and his necessity of periodic revolutions to clear out the deadwood and establish the new base for advancing further.

I don't expect that trying to make a hard fact out of my observation is going to be useful. For one, to make it at least falsifiable we'd need hard definitions of "disproportionate" and "advances", plus we're already talking of expectations, so it's going to be either a mess or a pedantic slog. If you think the observation is misleading, well, it's not the first time we disagree on fuzzy things :-)