That's been steady for awhile now.

Sure, but mostly because evolution's so good at it. The fact that evolution so quickly filled a tidal pool, so quickly filled all the tidal pools, so quickly filled the oceans, so quickly covered the land, is evidence of strength rather than weakness.

There does seem to be a "punctuated equilibrium" effect here; life fills a region, appears static for a while, but then makes a breakthrough and rapidly fills another region. It could be argued that this is also true of things that humans optimize for: human population growth has abruptly rapidly accelerated at least twice (invention of agriculture, industrial revolution). Slavery was everywhere in the ancient world, then eliminated across most of it in the space of a century. Gay marriage went from hopefully-it-will-happen-in-my-lifetime to anyone who opposed it being basically shunned. Scientific and technological breakthroughs tend to look a lot like this.

Generalizing this to all optimization processes would be very speculative.