Yes, lots of technologies work like that. Solar panels. Deep learning in pretty much its modern form was invented decades ago, but had to wait for the hardware to get good enough to show results. Personal computing took decades to take off. Heavier than air travel spent centuries as a curiosity.
Tipping points are fundamental to the nature of reality. Technology improves through decades of little tweaks and incremental improvements, which can sometimes bring a technology to a point where it's optimal and suddenly dominates the landscape.
