Software has become slower and less efficient because we have faster hardware to run it on and nobody's asking for the software to get more efficient. Back in the day you had inefficient, expensive hardware with limited software. There was demand to make software as performant as possible so it didn't cost you ten grand to serve a popular website. But now you can load up on hardware for pennies on what it used to cost. 16 cores? Sure! 32 gigs of ram? No sweat. Software can now be bloated and slow and it won't break the bank. On top of that, we now have free CDNs, free TLS certs, even free cloud hosting, and domains are a couple bucks. You can serve traffic for free today that would have cost $50K 15 years ago.

Sometimes there's also a misunderstanding of metrics that leads devs to not think about performance tuning. Like, "4.2M requests a day" is clearly incorrect at this 50rps benchmark. Traffic is not linear, it's bursty. You will never serve 50rps of human traffic steadily for 24 hours. If you're serving 4.2M requests per day, 90% of it will be in a 12 hour window, peaking at whenever people have lunch or get off work, with a short steep climb leading to a longer tail. So to not crash your site at peak visitorship, you realistically need to handle 300+ rps in order to achieve 4.2M requests per day. (But also that's requests per second... if under load it takes 5 seconds to load your site, you can still serve a larger amount of traffic, it's just slower... so a different benchmark is also "how many requests before the server literally falls over")