This was true in the 2000's and 2010's as well. A lot of the work could be handled by a single monolithic app running on one or a small handful of servers. Howe

This was true in the 2000's and 2010's as well. A lot of the work could be handled by a single monolithic app running on one or a small handful of servers. However, because of the microservices fad, people often created complicated microservices distributed across auto-scaling kubernetes clusters, just for the art of it. It was unneeded complexity then, as it is now, in the majority of cases.