This is a good, simple way to show how much can be done with modest resources.
Sometimes we see people fetishizing bigger and faster, then gatekeeping when people want to do the same work with modest means, whether it a four quid a month hosting service or a first generation Raspberry Pi. Not everyone has the money or desire for bigger & faster, and it's nice to see that here.
I'm not sure it's so much about fetishizing, and more about realistic expectations around software development in larger teams.
If you are the sole developer working on your own site - be it a side project/hobby/labour of love or your source of income - you have complete control up and down the stack and have the leeway to tweak performance wherever needed - whether that's indexing and optimizing queries in the backend, reducing the size of your static assets, caching, whatever. You can even yank whole features if you feel their inherent complexity and load outweighs their usefulness.
In anything including and above a medium sized company, a single developer will rarely have the leeway to do anything beyond tinker with their small slice of the stack. They might spend some hours carefully optimizing a query, but it's for naught because the frontend team have screwed up the webpack settings and the JS load runs into many MB. Or you have both done your jobs but the PM wants a ton of analytics on every page. And the CEO's pet feature is a maintenance and performance nightmare but nobody has the clout to have it removed or even simplified. Nobody wants to waste sprints on paying down tech debt in a feature factory, so it becomes progressively harder to fix performance issues.
At that point, the cheaper and politically easier option is to just fire the money cannon at expensive cloud services and hope the extra spend squeezes out some performance gains.
Sometimes we see people fetishizing bigger and faster, then gatekeeping when people want to do the same work with modest means, whether it a four quid a month hosting service or a first generation Raspberry Pi. Not everyone has the money or desire for bigger & faster, and it's nice to see that here.