One difference is that Rob Pike did it without all the negative externalities of gen ai.

But more broadly this is like a version of the negligibility problem. If you provide every company 1 second of additional productivity, while summation of that would appear to be significant, it would actually make no economic difference. I'm not entirely convinced that many low impact (and often flawed) projects realistically provide business value at scale an can even be compared to a single high impact project.