It's the 1000th time that Caltech unifies two of their large scale astrophysics computational models to bridge the gap between them? That seems off by a few orders of magnitude, at the very least?

Not the commenter, but I appreciate their sentiment. If the headline was something like "Caltech unifies two of their astrophysics models to bridge the gap and increase understanding of cosmology" then I'd say they're being snarky for the sake of snark. But the headline as is... Yes we've seen that plenty from University PR lately and it doesn't grab my attention anymore

Not sure I understand the "lately" part there: this is not a sudden change, big name universities have used these kind of headlines for decades, the idea that you know what the article's about without reading the article never really applied in the first place?

General Relativity is over a century old and the Standard Model was in it's current form in the mid 70's. Much of the details have shaken out from those things and while there is certainly still progress being made both in refining current theories and developing options for future ones, physics has indeed slowed down quite a bit in overall progress which was kind of an explosion between say 1875 and 1975 (let's not quibble with exact dates here).

Particle physics has slowed down, but astrophysics has accelerated.

Just to put things in perspective, the Hubble Space Telescope was only launched in 1990. Digital cameras, vastly larger telescopes, space telescopes, computers capable of analyzing much larger quantities of data and running much larger simulations have transformed astrophysics over the last 35 years or so.