Of course, if you make enough incremental steps, the result is revolutionary. See for example, the series of small incremental steps from the the first transistor to the current 2 billion transistor integrated circuits.
TL;DR on the blog article I posted: in any complex fitness landscape there are points unreachable by simple gradient ascent. Innovation simply cannot be 100% incremental. Leaps must occur, and these are qualitatively different from hill climbing.
