No, that's mostly not it--I am glad your partner seems to be okay and please do not mistake wishful thinking about what is transformative for how things actually work! It could be unnecessarily fatal.
The reason why lots of people still die of cancer is that we live longer now. We are substantially better at treating cancer than in 1950, but cancer rates increase exponentially with age, as do most diseases of aging, so you have to be a lot better at curing cancer and also not better at stopping other causes of death for the rate of death due to cancer to go down.
The transformative realization about cancer already happened (gradually): there isn't one mechanism for cancer or to stop cancer. It's a grab-bag of the entire set of things that can go wrong with control of cellular growth, and although there are some commonalities (because there are general-purpose regulatory networks that are supposed to stop this sort of thing), cancer is a disease where specifics matter. This doesn't mean that there aren't still general gains to be made (e.g. we still need to understand a lot more about immune surveillance), but we know that it's going to only have moderate impacts unless we can someday reverse aging. What's transformational is to accept the actual difficulty of the problem and tackle it all.
Once we understood this, and accepted that to do really well against cancer it can't be a magic bullet but rather a huge arsenal of specific weapons to use against specific foes, we started actually making progress with specific cancers in things like 10 year survivorship. The transformation in understanding already happened, and all we needed was the usual pragmatic scientific epistemology: don't be too sure, follow the evidence, check your assumptions with data.
For instance, with non-Hodgkin lymphoma we basically didn't make much progress in the first decade of the 2000s when we were still more in the magic bullet mindset. But better-targeted therapies have resulted in the risk of death over 5 years dropping in half: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9551310/
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Most of the rest of your points, though thoughtful and well-argued, suffer from similarly large flaws. Some highlights.
* Hoffman has half-rediscovered, without noticing it, that you need nervous systems to be responsive to rapidly changing environments. When conditions change slowly relative to evolution, you get non-veridical ad-hoc solutions baked in by evolution. When conditions vary faster than evolution, you have a selective advantage if your sensory system and processing reflects the reality of the matter. Most of his thesis follows from not noticing that his modeling experiments give the exact opposite result in the face of a rapidly varying objective function. So we have a non-veridical sense that snakes are scary because snakes have been dangerous to our fitness for a very long time; but we have a veridical sense that "that is a green tree snake over there wrapped around that branch" because a green tree snake over there wrapped around that branch has not been part of our evolutionary history. All his big conclusions fail to follow from his results because of his failure to notice this difference. (He might be randomly right about some things, but *not* because of the relationship between evolution and our ability to discern the nature of reality.)
* Consciousness is not a hard problem in principle; we just lack the ability to interrogate the pieces in the right way. There's no reason to believe we can't in principle understand it the way we understand all manner of other things by showing necessary and sufficient conditions, how manipulations alter it, and so on; the issue is just that we are tremendously far from being able to actually do the things that would be deeply illuminating. But we've already done it with the nature of life and the nature of perception in terms of how external stuff gets translated into internal information (philosophical theories of perception are pretty funny sometimes). Of course if you don't have the answer, and don't have a proof that there must be one, you can't be sure that you'll eventually find it. But it really really is not hard in any interesting sense, in that the same steps that make the hard problem of consciousness seem hard can be used to make all sorts of solved problems seem hard (and, indeed, philosophers made some of the same arguments about some of them). The reason why mind-body experts disagree is simply because they each have evidence which is highly, highly divorced from the mechanism of how things work. It's not like we have all the mechanism well-in-hand and understand it well and are still confused.
* Science can very much explain what makes life meaningful or worth living, in principle, as long as you don't come in with premises that are counterfactual. If, for instance, you demand that there be a grand overarching purpose to the universe and you ask science to find our morally uplifting and egotistically self-centering place in it, yeah, you're probably not going to get the answer that you want. But what if you ask: okay, what is "meaningful"? What's "worth living"? What does "having a point" consist of? Why do we even have a sense of "having a point"? What's all this stuff about? How does it work in general, and how does that relate to us as individuals? Then we already have pretty good answers! Now, it turns out that the narratives that make us feel good don't align very well with the actual answers. Cue Hoffman-style critique of non-veridical sensation: our error is that we embrace the appealing narrative because, actually, that has been pretty consistent in our social history and we have specialized detectors for it (presumably--again, the brain is too complicated for us to have any detailed mechanism). The actual answer is that meaning is almost surely a fitness-enhancing computation that couples our ability to generalize with our need to coordinate our behavior with the rest of our tribe; and that when you draw that out, purpose is a way for life to perpetuate; one of the many strategies that work, but it's our strategy. There was never a universal purpose; that was just a convenient cognitive stratagem that feels right. But, okay, the "purpose" is implanted in us by evolution to help us with the difficult task of being collectively and individually fit (evolutionarily speaking) in the context of being a social creature that very very very strongly embraces a K-strategy for fitness. If we lean into that, we can find a lot of lessons for what makes for a satisfying life.
* It is true that we haven't had many fundamental revelations about the nature of reality at the microscopic/universal level lately. But that's because we're getting incredibly accurate at those; there's not much room left. The things that we don't understand nearly so well are interactions and collective behavior, and we're still making big discoveries there. Chaos, for instance. We didn't appreciate that (mathematical) chaos was even a thing, let alone how important it is for understanding the world. Bifurcation points, complex attractors, etc.--you can't understand how things work without understanding that, even if you understand the pieces in isolation super-duper well because the universe isn't pieces in isolation. The other reason we haven't had many fundamental revelations about basic physics is that we're pretty much out of ideas about how to collect better data that can be fed meaningfully into the standard pragmatic scientific epistemology loop. This doesn't mean that scientific epistemology is wrong (we do need to keep track of things like the replication crisis, but when you dig these are all because people took shortcuts and botched their epistemology not because we didn't understand in principle how to gain knowledge). It just means that it requires certain preconditions, and we can't always meet those. Sometimes the preconditions are overstated, but you can't understate them too much either or you lose the coupling to how-things-are.
So, anyway, tl;dr is:
(1) The transformational realization with cancer already happened.
(2) Hoffman applies his conclusions in regimes where his results fail to hold.
(3) Purpose and meaning are our way to live an evolutionary fit life together with other members of our species.
(4) Revelations about interactions are ongoing in science (along with discovering many extra details), and those are the low-hanging big-picture fruit we're still picking.