Our brains use roughly ~20 watts though, so we know that the power constraints can be overcome, if not in silicon then it may be biological machines we use in the future.
The previous problems were solved because people were willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to solve them. And they are still spending that kinds of money.
If the normalcy bias was in effect, they wouldn't be spending that money.
Actually Normalcy Bias may in fact feed that kind of money spending until such time as reality hits. Assuming that people will automatically act more logically when large amounts of money is in play flies in the face of recent history. Just look at the recent housing loan crisis. Normalcy Bias played a part there.
It's certainly possible that we'll break more barriers with clever engineering and new scientific breakthroughs. But that doesn't mean the Normalcy Bias isn't in play here.
Normalcy bias may have people spending lots of money on fabs assuming that the problems would be solved by the time the fabs are built.
However, I'm talking hundreds of billions spent on R&D to specifically to solve problems associated with chip manufacture. It took on the order of 25 years to solve each of the problems listed in the grandparent's post. Nobody would spend that kind of money or time on something that they think somebody else would solve.
People have probably spent billions of dollars to find a cure for cancer, but there isn't one that works for all cancers and most are still very bad news.
Say you spent a hundred billion dollars to extinguish the sun- that wouldn't work. How much money you spend is irrelevant when you're up against what people call "hard physical limits".
Isn't our inability to cure all cancers a limitation of our knowledge more than a hard physical limit?
I've read several articles saying that different cancers are not exactly the same disease, but more like different diseases with the same symptom (uncontrolled tumor growth) and different etiology, even sometimes different from person to person, not just from tissue to tissue. This was said to be a reason that a general cancer cure is so elusive. But is it really thought of as impossible, not just elusive?
Maybe our inability to extinguish the sun is also a limitation of knowledge more than a hard physical limit!
Even if I'm right about this, your description of the situation would still be accurate in that there would be no way to simply throw more money at the problems and guarantee a solution; there would need to be qualitative breakthroughs which aren't guaranteed to happen at any particular level of expenditure. If people had spent multiples of the entire world GDP on a space program in the 1500s, they would still not have been able to get people to the moon, though not because it's physically impossible to do so in an absolute sense.
That previous constraints have been beaten in no way supports the argument that we will beat the laws of physics this time.