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history doesn't repeat but it rhymes?
Andy Summers pretty much rewrote the rule book about the guitar worked in a trio - not just his very clever use of effects - but very sophisticated chord voicings. I very underrated player.
Beck has continued to evolve a highly idiocincratic style.
I suppose what you're getting at @koneguitarist is that perhaps 'mainstream' guitar playing hasn't really moved on? Apart from Summers - that's probably true - but as others have mentioned, on the fringes there's all sorts of interesting stuff going on.
Not trying to pick a fight, but Steve Hackett was tapping on Genesis recordings several years before EVH.
Several people had used tapping well before Van Halen, I think Eddie got it from watching Billy Gibbons and expanding the technique but other rock players (including Hackett and Harvey Mandel) had used it a bit and there were jazzers doing it for decades.
Just to reiterate what I think I said earlier that if you're using Van Halen I as the bench mark then what came after was the end of that lineage of blues rock based guitar bands as being the mainstream. The Police, U2, The Smiths, even Metallica had guitars but they used them in a different way with less of the guitar hero shtick. Again, Van Halen weren't really that well known in the UK at the time outside of guitar magazines. I suspect he's more widely known as a guitar hero for Beat It than anything else he'd done.
What he did do was bring blues back into fashion after the disco and synth-driven era of the late 70's and early 80's.
He was absolutely a very influential musician, not only amongst guitarists, but amongst music lovers who wanted to get back to a music more earthy and - for want of a better word - animalistic.
I think that is ultimately the answer to the OP. The guitar is a simple instrument really, and it's use will go in cycles along with the techniques. The only was I can see a leap of the Clapton, Hendrix, EVH style is if a new technique is invented and that would have to involve a new piece of technology, whether a pick or something held in the left or right hand.
That leaves note choices (Reinhardt, McLaughlin, Holdsworth, Zappa) and sonic textures (Summers, Fripp, Belew, Torn).
We can only play what we can reach. (Hence, the dearth of Holdsworth, Via or Gilbert tribute bands.) Signal processors present endless possibilities for sound modification. Maybe this explains their current fashionability?
Anyone who does anything truly innovative is just going to get compared to Jimi Hendrix. He has a fifty year head start on market acceptance.
The most influential guitarist ever.
Because he not only essentially created a music form - metal - but by doing that he created an entire subculture which goes beyond the guitar, or even music. Of all the bands and guitarists who were considered 'heavy metal' in the late 60s and early 70s, only Black Sabbath remain so today.
That doesn't answer the original question, I know...
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
“Theory is something that is written down after the music has been made so we can explain it to others”– Levi Clay