>IMO, that quote's garbage and really "back in my day". Our resources are just more powerful today.

Which is the whole point if the quote. And the "back in my day" is 100% true in the field of programming. Ever heard of Moore's law? Ever tried to program with 8K RAM?

>We still run into performance issues with things like bulk updates and computation times (MapReduce / distributed computing) quite frequently.

Yes, we still run into "performance issues". But with MILLION times the data they ran into performance issues with.

Heck, we can now do a whole computer of the time interpreted in a web browser in Javascript and still get acceptable speed to play games in it.

Perspective man.