This is just not true, and has never been true since the advent of science.
We first measured the speed of light in the 17th century using planetary eclipses. We knew back then that light travelled at 100,000s of miles per second. And we’ve known ever since. We had guns that shot bullets at supersonic speed for hundreds of years. The crack of a whip (probably quite an old invention) also travels faster than the speed of sound.
The sound barrier was seen as a challenge of engineering due to the problems that occur with vehicle stability when going supersonic, it was not (and has never been) seen as a limitation within the confines of allowable behaviour within the frameworks determined by physical laws.
Put it this way.
It’s like me saying “walk through that wall there”
And you say “I can’t do that, that’s a ridiculous suggestion”
So I say “well we used to think we couldn’t walk through fences until we invented gates, but now we have gates we can do that, who’s to say we can’t walk through walls?”
It’s not a lack of ingenuity that stops us travelling at light speed. It is a strict physical limitation.
I will say that there are potentially ways to circumvent the need to travel at light speed (e.g. warping space-time as in wormholes). And that is a challenge of ingenuity, but that is an altogether different problem.
