There are improvements in both performance and understandability.
On the performance front, see Algorand's consensus protocol (2016 ish), which can run on 10,000s of nodes, using a cryptographic technique called "sortition" which sub-selects a small committee of nodes to actually broadcast messages of the consensus protocol.
On the understandability front, this is my research area; we put out a new protocol recently (https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/463) that is faster and much easier than PBFT (and crash fault equivalents like Paxos/Raft). But there's a long line of prior work here.
Traditionally, consensus (PBFT,Paxos,Raft) has run on a small set of nodes (i.e. a dozen) and also has used what are called "stable leaders", where a single leader process sequences all transactions until it is detected to be faulty. Stable leaders are great for data centers.
Blockchains made it so that now protocols support thousands of nodes, and also use "rotating leaders", where a different node proposes each block (for fairness reasons). It happens that using rotating leaders allows for simpler protocols (in particular, with easier proofs).
As it is your domain of expertise, can you give more details on the new/improved ones please?