You are right. It's amusing how this pattern emerges often: an unoptimized tech stack gives mild performance results. This is "good enough" for most people. Over the years everyone seems to assume that's just the way it is and it will always be because the tech is inherently "complex". Then a competitor comes out of the water and their performance blows everyone out of the water, so everyone realized the tech could have been optimized all this way if anyone had just tried to.

Yeah, this is especially true with multi-gigabit networking. It's actually really depressing how hard it is to find performant solutions, be it for file sharing or just HTTP.