> even low-end smartphones have more RAM than high-end servers had in 2009

That's even less accurate. By two orders of magnitude. High-end servers in 2009 had way more than 4GB. The (not even high-end) HP Proliant I installed for a small business in 2008, that was already bought used at the time, had 128GB of RAM.

I understand why one would want to make an article entertaining but that seriously makes me doubt the rest of the articles when diving into a topic I don't know as much.

I guess that they may have meant workstations / servers for horizontally scaled software, but yes, I agree that that sentence does seem misleading