Plenty of things measured in millions are small. A million bytes is a small amount of memory. There are plenty of domains where a working definition of "small"

Plenty of things measured in millions are small. A million bytes is a small amount of memory. There are plenty of domains where a working definition of "small" is roughly "can be slurped into memory on a single node without jumping through hoops for provisioning". A million iterations that total to order of ten seconds seems quite reasonable for a quick performance comparison. It's just underspecified for the rest of us to take away much beyond that.