@.h. It remains a personal feat for him, surely, but let's not pretend that it came as a result of his individual quality more than it came as a result of team style and performance. You can claim that he was the main reason for all that if you wish, but let's not pretend that his scoring was something the team relied upon.
It looks impressive when you see that Lukaku in 2 seasons managed to have two Top 5 scoring seasons, both 30+, from 1980-81* until today.
I'll illustrate a bigger picture below using some pretty straight forward parameters I selected.
So you can see here that Lukaku is joint 2nd and 5th in the last 40 odd years. But you'll also notice that the list is very modern heavy, only 3 entries in our top 15 are not from the last 20 years (Ronaldo, Serena, Altobelli 1985).
From this list, apart from Adriano in 2004-5, he has the two lowest scoring ratios from non-Penalty goals.
From the minutes per goal (including PKs), his second season ranks 5th out of 15.
But you can notice that the related non-PK number makes quite a jump there.
Another underrated parameter is how many goals less were scored by our scorer:
Two top 5 entries for the last two seasons once again, with Lautaro having a much closer gap than most other high scoring seasons. Eto'o is the only one who comes close in a 30+ goal performance in 2009-10 with a 14 goal difference. Djorkaeff and Pazzini in 1998 and 2011 lag significantly. I mean just consider that this selection relates only to 25+ goal scoring seasons and the gap is 24 and 26 goals from 1st to 2nd alone in those seasons, whereas Lukaku's performances is closer to what a healthy 25-28 goal season would look like in the 2000s.
Now taking only the players who scored at least 25% of our goal total, here's how it looks:
As you can see, while it's a very good feat, it doesn't really rank very high in the "carrying us" rhetoric that people have been throwing around for almost 2 years now.
When you discount penalties as well (formula removes players's PK goals and removes the total PK goals scored by the team's total, data entry from transfermarkt), using the 25% as the cut off once again:
where Lukaku ranks in the low 20s with both entries out of 41 seasons.
Now, that's just looking at numbers. You mention that Vieri, Ronaldo, Adriano, Zlatan etc never did that. But they played in a different era, a time with less goals scored in general, with more strikers, some would argue tougher to score as well due to better defenses and competition and of course, less games. And most importantly, these players rarely played consecutive seasons in full fitness.
I don't think other than Eto'o, Icardi and Palacio did we have a striker in the last 20 seasons where they had consecutive seasons with more than 30 games played in the league. I'm sure Vieri and Ronaldo didn't, not sure if Cruz managed that but he was hardly a striker. Don't recall if Adriano managed 2 full seasons, but it's possible. Milito definitely wasn't as much around out in his second year, though his 3rd was better than his 1st.
And there's the issue that Icardi and Palacio played for teams that kinda sucked and Eto'o was sacrificed in his first season quite a lot. You could argue that it's remarkable that he's stayed away from injuries, but that's where it should end.
Hitting a landmark of 30 goals is definitely noteworthy, but removing all context from it to exaggerate someone's output feels silly to me and yes, I'll keep calling it out as long as it's a thing.
*1980-81 is just the date I picked to start gathering the data, will eventually go further back.
P.S: I could enhance the dataset, open to suggestions. But would like to keep it goal related only, though standings and Europe progression is something I was considering to include but not sure how to implement it.