[0xDEAFBEAD]

So we've been in the "late stages" for at least 50 years? Is there any sort of falsifiable hypothesis there?

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=late-stage+cap...

You can see from Google Ngram Viewer that there's almost no usage before the year 2000, and the vast majority of usage is post-2015. My guess would be that recent usage has only a tenuous connection, at best, to scholarly usage from 50+ years ago.