It still does help in the clean way it used to. The problem is that the physical world is providing more constraints like lack of power and chips and data. Three years ago there was scaling headroom created by the gaming industry, the existing power grid, untapped data artefacts on the internet, and other precursor activities.

The scaling laws are also power laws, meaning that most of the big gains happen early in the curve, and improvements become more expensive the further you go along.