I think the xkcd comic was more about academia vs product engineering in for profit entities. If anything, it is the collaborative effort of many people working on a product with deadlines that ends up with some of them coming up with really interesting solutions just due to the number of people looking. The lack of sharing between companies does increase the incidence of the outsider effect, at the massive cost of reinventing basic knowledge over and over. The only reason breakthroughs still happen despite that is just the large number of people trying random stuff that probably won't work motivated by unrealistic deadlines. They don't know it probably won't work though...
The point seems more to me that in engineering, breakthroughs worthy of academic repute aren't given much fanfare, though probably a bit of an exaggeration. It's hard to tell to what extent his comics reflect actual sentiments or rather an artifice of some abstraction taken to an absurd level.
