> You could argue the scales are different, but computers are also faster now.

Scale is everything and a faster computer doesn’t always help. Vertical scaling has limits, and complex distributed systems are complex.

Since you seem to possess a diagnosis and remedy with a reasonable amount of certainty, I’m sure they’d love to hear from you and have you fix all their problems for them. Especially if you can do it while not making the problem worse in any dimension.

The link in my previous comment answers the credentials question in detail- including specific technical post-mortems on horizontally scaled stateful systems. Vertical scaling wasn't the topic.