There was a time where a request taking even 500ms was considered to be slow, and then all of a sudden it just became normal to see API traces where requests wo

There was a time where a request taking even 500ms was considered to be slow, and then all of a sudden it just became normal to see API traces where requests would take over a second, or multiple seconds, and people would just shrug at it. Even a backend roughly cobbled together in PHP4 with Varnish running on top of it would considerably outperform some of the stuff that is accepted as 'good enough' today.