There's absolutely loads being done for the first time here. Not least of which: running this r&d off commercial contracts instead of directly off taxpayer money.
Apollo also invented, funded and productized a lot of modern embedded computing and computer manufacturing, to keep in our lane here. Obviously SpaceX has access to a very different tech environment that yes, Apollo helped push forward.
Manufacturing the Apollo Guidance Computer (which wasn't in the rocket per-se, but was wired up to it and could fly the rocket in certain scenarios) alone consumed around 40% of the US' entire IC production capacity at the time.
It's way harder to do it the first time.