There is definitely a lot of truth to this, but when talking about exponential growth in particular, the growth is often so huge that it eclipses any conceivabl

There is definitely a lot of truth to this, but when talking about exponential growth in particular, the growth is often so huge that it eclipses any conceivable linear function in practice pretty quickly. Also, given sufficiently large numbers, better asymptotic growth always beats. So this is less wrong when talking about huge businesses.