It may have been back then, though I'd argue that you could have done it back then with efficient code and a very well-tuned DB.

Today big boxes are big. Really big. Stuff like 128 cores, 1TB RAM, and dozens of terabytes of incredibly fast RAIDed flash storage is available out there.

They're also more reliable than they used to be. Hardware still fails of course, but it doesn't fail as often as OG spinning disk did.