> and do indeed get faster as hardware speeds up.
This is not actually true, it still has the same scaling bottlenecks with state access but they are expressed differently (via hidden tx finality slowdowns) since it does not have an effective fee market.
Solana also ignores that part of the core reasoning that you'd want to use blockchains is for their decentralization and your ability to independently verify them in their pursuit of being able to claim 4000 tx/s. You need a 10 gigabit network connection to run a full node.
Ideal condition speed vs congestion speed is a different thing- I'm not suggesting they don't face the standard scaling bottlenecks, but it is also true that under similar congestion conditions, the network will run faster as hardware improves.
SQL databases also run slower under high load, which is totally independent of faster hardware allowing for faster databases vs the baseline
Re: independent verification, I agree with you. It's not a great tradeoff. I'm not here to shill Solana as a panacea or anything of the sort, just pointing out clear inaccuracies from the OOP.