What type of consultant was he? Marketing or web app development? Did he have decades of experience to charge such rates?
(I agree with everything else you have said. My Xioami smartphone from 2014 is faster than the Packard-Bell computer I used back in the mid-90s... yet companies always find a way to slow things down. They used to do it with Flash. One catalog company even did their ENTIRE website in Flash... when people were still using 56k modems and DSL was not as widespread as before.)
Data integration consultant with around 10 years of experience. Sounds fancy but it was about making sure their Facebook posts also get tweeted, when they post a new YouTube video it also gets published to their FB Page, that they are able to connect their Salesforce with Slack (or suggest them to use Slack) and blah.
He even worked with a bank that decided to close down their website and redo entire netbanking in some .net based installable app because it was supposedly secure. After spending a lot of money and a pilot with 10,000 users they discovered that nearly 80% of their users who were forced to use it simply move the money out of the bank.
You can not win these kind of contracts easily. You need to have ex-classmates inside who will make the right introductions. You need to hang out with right people, please them and so on. Race, Sex also plays a big role. For example overwhelmingly white people will chose a white person over an Indian and vice versa.
While the tech work is pretty less, the social engineering involved is hard to scale.
(I agree with everything else you have said. My Xioami smartphone from 2014 is faster than the Packard-Bell computer I used back in the mid-90s... yet companies always find a way to slow things down. They used to do it with Flash. One catalog company even did their ENTIRE website in Flash... when people were still using 56k modems and DSL was not as widespread as before.)