I think this is a fantastic insight. There is a particular mindset of security thinking which compartmentalizes breach impacts on the basis of how much of the s

I think this is a fantastic insight. There is a particular mindset of security thinking which compartmentalizes breach impacts on the basis of how much of the security infrastructure itself is compromised. 'well, they get remote code execution, but at least they can't recover passwords', or 'this vulnerability is bad because it allows recovery of temporary TLS keys'. And Spectre/Meltdown seems to turn every vulnerability into one of these 'world shattering' security breaches that mean your secret keys are all exposed. But for servers, the application-level vulnerabilities that are needed in order to get meltdown or spectre attacks to run are already devastating. Take over a game server process and you own the in game currency and the scores and the ability to ban users, and probably user level login as well. And you have your pick of privilege escalation mechanisms already, probably.