Modern-day Access: Filemaker Pro was the contemporary competitor and still lives and has usergroups today; Airtables and similar (all SQL-based form managers) are the modern options.
Years ago I worked for a company that claimed to have largest Filemaker Pro database in the southern hemisphere. One day there was some sort of disk issue and filemaker silently failed, then for months it kept pretending that everything was fine, it just wasn't writing to disk. This lasted until a power outage one day when the company discovered it had lost months of customer data, no backups of course, the backup system was working fine but there was no new information being written.
Data loss isn't forgivable, especially in the non-technical user space that filemaker is aiming for.
I'd be interested in knowing who the company was, and the metric they used to judge their database size. I worked on one that was 4GB data and >40GB binary files (photos, documents). Interestingly, when all the data was removed and the file was optimised it came to less than 2MB.
I guess I'm talking about a cultural difference. It's been my experience that Access devs know when a problem is mismatched for Access (and move to storing data in SQL Server, etc). FileMaker devs seem to press on even when it's clear that the platform isn't capable of supporting their needs.
As one anecdote (of several): I support an instance of a FileMaker application w/ several 500MB+ "FMP" files, each of which take _hours_ to "integrity check" when the "FileMaker Server" process crashes unexpectedly. We talked to the dev about putting at least some of the data into an RDBMS (MSSQL, Postgres, etc) and they scoffed at the idea. It simply didn't occur to their mind that the platform might not be a good fit for the purpose.
Had Microsoft gone for a more custom interface like Filemaker instead of just nicely packaging up more general tools, my entire life might be very different and probably not better, even 15 years after having touched Access for the last time.