The article is interesting, but what does the title have to do with it ?
> What we really needed to make distributed task queueing robust are durable queues ...
> Durable queues were rare when I was at Reddit, but they’re more and more popular now.
It sounds like the answer was known at the time but there wasn't the resources to solve it ?
Back then, you couldn't build a performant queue in a database without a huge number of resources, both hardware wise and people wise. That's why only huge enterprises were using them then.
Only recently (last decade or so), has the performance of an open source database on modest hardware caught up to the alternatives.