Yes, but this only really means that you can now get blocks out faster (lower block times), not that you can evaluate more transactions to put in them. And you

Yes, but this only really means that you can now get blocks out faster (lower block times), not that you can evaluate more transactions to put in them. And you can only start evaluating those transactions once you see the previous block, since you need to know what transactions are now confirmed and so should not be included in your block (save for "greedy" mining that doesn't put any txs in the block in order to avoid waiting — which doesn't really work with Ethereum's GHOST consensus-selection anyway.) Block times on Ethereum were already very long compared to other Ethereum-alike blockchains, to reduce the impact of mining processing on throughput (i.e. if block time is 10s, then you only need to deal with mining overhead once per 10s period.) Combined with the fact that people were spending exactly as much on GPUs to accelerate this process as profit margins would allow, and you'll find that not that much wall-clock time was really being spent per minute on the sequential bottleneck of mining. It's the aggregate CPU time that was being spent on mining that was economically and ecologically damaging.