We did lose the way, and then we found it again. Not everything has caught up yet but a lot has.

Moore's law kept going, and software started getting a little bit faster, which was enough to stop undoing the gains made by hardware, and now things are back to mostly snappy.

Occasionally you'll get a 30mb file that's slow... but subjectively things sure seem better than 10 years ago when you couldn't even think about optimization without someone beating you over the head with a "premature optimization is the root of all evil" quote.