This article reminds me a lot of a conversation with an expert DBA recently. We were talking about performance improvements and he said that upgrading hardware is almost negligible. Upgrading from HDD to SSD gives you 10x boost. SSD to nvme maybe 4x. But optimizing queries and fixing indexes can give you 100x or 1000x improvements.

Of course, every little bit counts, so we still did upgrade the hardware, but (at least in our area), almost all speed improvements came from code optimization.

This article is talking about kicking the ipv4 can down down the road only 10 years and increasing process memory from 2G to 32G. Seems like such small fries when we could just double it and move on. If you brought the 2038 problem to Unix devs, I'm sure they would have said "thanks! We'll start with 64-bit" instead of "yes... Let's use an unaligned 36 bits so the problem is hidden slightly longer".