Looking at this question, I am realizing how hard it is. In order to answer it, you must be familiar with a number of speakers brands… say five and what they sounded like ten years ago and now. More would be better. It would be really hard to compare random ten year old speakers with different speakers, since there are so many different flavors and each person has such particular tastes and listening abilities.
So ten years typically makes an important difference. Brands that I have known in the comparison include Sonus Faber, B&W, DynAudio, Kef and a couple more. Each maintained their house sound while making overall improvements.
So, the final part of the question… what does compete mean? I guess it means that in side by side test there is no competition… the newer is better, easy call. Or does it mean a notable improvement that most folks would recognize regardless of their overall liking of the house sound? So in the former case no and the later case yes.
I’m just not sure what to do with the dredged up two or three speakers that became ledgendary like Quad and never go out of favor… these are outliers. The vast majority of speaker companies that have remained in business continue to make significant improvements over time, decade by decade.