> Does anyone remember the state of the electric car industry prior to Elon Musk?
Yep. We had the Nissan Leaf and a couple other minor contenders. And then we got the Bolt just before the Model 3 was released, and the Bolt is still by far the better value.
The Model S made EVs sexy for a time, and that's nice, but it's hard to say that it meaningfully accelerated the transition overall. EVs were in the pipeline already, waiting for battery prices to get into the right range, and that's exactly what has happened.
Well Tesla did prove that EVs can road trip reliably and did design the north American standard (which before was named with great hubris but now is actually accurate against all odds).