DuckDB > geopandas, certainly for anything out of core. Though, I recently gave up on importing 70GB worth of large multipolygons (from a csv in hex wkb), and just used a postgis container. In concert with DuckDB's growth, I'd also mark the advent of geoparquet.

The big change, in my view, over the past decade in GIS software, is in compute and storage efficiency across the typical stack. DuckDB has become a part of this, but h/t to the advances from shapely, geopandas, geoparquet, and GDAL. There's a lot of overlap in that venn diagram, and credit should be spread around. QGIS is great, too, though I feel there is market opportunity to apply 90/10 to its massive feature set and move it to the web.