Good comments above - I'll add a few points.
Like pretty much all manufactured products, the quality range has compressed as the industry has matured. There are hundreds (thousands?) of speaker models available now and for the most part they are all pretty good for their price points. This is due to thousands of refinements that keep improving the quality as the bar gets raised higher and higher.
Breakthroughs are few and far between. Every manufacturer wants to say that their cone material or their crossover design is revolutionary but it is just marketing hype. There are a few examples where the designer is truly doing something different, i.e. MBL, but even that technology has been around for decades.
If you can possibly swing it I would highly recommend that you go to an audio show. AXPONA is coming up but there are shows all around the country. There is just no better way to hear how different speakers compare.
I'm going to give my view on a related question. I have a Krell preamp (KRC-2) and amp (KSA 300S) plus a pair of Thiel CS6 speakers that all date from the mid 90's. I went to the 2018 AXPONA and I was very pleasantly surprised to find out that my system holds its own compared to everything but the megabuck systems. In a few cases my system sounded better, to my ears, than speakers costing 6 figures. I can't tell you how many systems I heard where the cords, cables, and interconnects cost more than my entire system and the sound wasn't anything special. Granted, my room is more optimized than a typical room at the hotel but if there has been some sort of breakthrough in the last 25 years I can't hear it.
There was one notable exception - the MBL room playing the 101 Extremes Mk II. The sound in that room was indeed different and better, at least to my taste. I went back again and again and concluded that this is the system I would own if I could afford it.