At least in the global West, the distinctions between decades were dramatic, comparing for example the early 1910s to the late 1920s, or the 1950s to the 1960s. Massive changes occurred in short periods of time.
Did material and social changes cycle as rapidly in former centuries as well, or was this a byproduct of factors exclusive to the 20th century?
There's a major problem with the premise of your question, unfortunately.
Each decade of the 20th century is pretty easily distinguishable from one another ... the distinctions between decades were dramatic ...
This is a very common misconception. Pop culture treats each decade as a distinct entity, possibly dating to the nostalgia for the "Gay/Naughty Nineties" that started to appear in the 1920s, but in reality change is constant. The 1910s and 1920s, as used in your example, are actually a fantastic support for my point - as you say, comparing the early 1910s and late 1920s shows a huge difference, but that's not the difference between two different decades, it's the difference that accrues over roughly twenty years. I'm going to focus on fashion as it's easily comparable, but the same is true of your other concepts.
In the early 1910s, women wore slender dresses with high waistlines. During World War I, hemlines flared out and shortened, while the waistline was frequently at the natural level. In the immediate postwar years, a loose silhouette became fashionable, and the waist could be high, medium, or low. The very early 1920s saw the waist still defined and the skirt fairly full. Within a few years, hemlines would drop to the floor, and waistlines would begin to follow. Hemlines rose around 1925 to give us the stereotypical "flapper" look - though even with that, some women chose to keep with a full-skirted look. In 1928, hemlines dropped again, but only in the back. They would drop in the front in 1930. There is no clear dividing line between the two decades, stylistically; there are certain things you can point at changing 1919-1921, but those things aren't more important than the changes ca. 1915 or ca. 1925, and the fashions of 1925-1927 that really define the stereotype of the decade are not more inherently "of the decade" than the ones that don't.
The same is true of the 1950s and 1960s. While the changes that occurred between 1950 and 1959 were in some ways more subtle than those of the 1910s, "the 1960s" certainly didn't start on 1960. By this point, there's much less of a straightforward fashion narrative, as you have street fashion, conservative haute couture, and avant-garde haute couture all doing kind of their own things. In the latter category, you have designers like Balenciaga making waistless tubes for socialites in 1955; meanwhile mainstream department stores were still selling full-skirted casual and cocktail dresses in 1962. Going forward, those avant-garde couturiers would bring in "the 1970s" in the second half of the decade while the average woman's workday outfit in the early 1970s wouldn't look much different than it had in the late 1960s.
Did material and social changes cycle as rapidly in former centuries as well, or was this a byproduct of factors exclusive to the 20th century?
So, getting away from the idea that 20th century fashion/culture was changing "by the decade" - yes, before the 20th century we saw regular changes. I discuss the 19th century in this previous answer; I would say that before the Industrial Revolution, the changes weren't as regular or as frequent, but I discuss the changes in skirt shapes and wigs in the 18th century in two previous answers as well.
