Sadly 95%+ of the people on the sub have heard an extremely small portion of whats out there and asking a question like this will mostly just yield hd650 = best headphone even though it couldn't be further from the truth.

As someone that's heard pretty much everything from 10$ to 30000$ it's certainly safe to say there's obviously improvements made or at least to some degree, more competitive pricing for the same thing.

HE1, HE60 and stax omega sealed the deal for state of the art best sounding thing to exist, and now there's a few more headphones that has joined the same performance level at a much more competitive price.

Same with Arya and focal clear, extremely competitive pricing (as of now), without them the upgrade steps would be wildly different for a lot of people.

Same with dacamps u can get 3000$ performance from like a 600-700$ stack now because of the competition.

In terms of absolute peak it's the matter of experience, u can say that the newer systems that's designed to beat/compete against the old best are better, at least objectively they're on the same playing field which means to some people they're better.

STAX x9000 and Warwicks acoustics bravura/aperio, abyss Diana TC ab1266TC, along with HE60/HE1/ShangriLa SR are the pinnacle for now, all of them offer different experiences of about the same performance, and you get to choose what's your preference.