I f the reason they want to distribute was performance then as a DB performance engineer, I can tell you first hand that tuning a database, indexing and caching

I f the reason they want to distribute was performance then as a DB performance engineer, I can tell you first hand that tuning a database, indexing and caching can keep 99.9% of the internet companies very happy. I know its hard to imagine, but it is true and most devops teams look to a shiny new tech they saw at a meet up than (like you said) fix 90s era technologies.