No. Bursts of change have been part of the speculation about evolution for decades.
Weren’t the “bursts of change” among the first failures of Darwinian predictions? In response ideas such as punctuated equilibrium were developed.
That’s my impression.
The ubiquity of morphological discontinuities between clades of organisms has troubled evolutionary biologists since Cuvier and Darwin and remains one of most important questions in evolutionary biology. Why is it that the distribution of morphologies is clumpy at virtually all scales? Although both Darwin and the proponents of the Modern Synthesis expected an 'insensible' gradation of form from one species to the next, this is only sometimes found among extant species (for example, among cryptic species) and is rare in the fossil record. Gradations in form are even less common at higher levels of the Linnean taxonomic hierarchy.
Erwin finds these discontinuities as troubling.
What has been part of evolutionary thinking for decades is to casually dismiss these concerns since they don't have a reasonable answer for the morphological discontinuities or the lack of fossil records.