Increasingly yes. A modern browser on a good laptop can crunch on GBs of data in a browser tab at once. This makes all sorts of data analysis and visualization

Increasingly yes. A modern browser on a good laptop can crunch on GBs of data in a browser tab at once. This makes all sorts of data analysis and visualization tasks feasible in a client-side web app where previously you would have needed a detected database server somewhere. Take a look at the https://kepler.gl/ https://kepler.gl/ demos to see quite how sophisticated this stuff can get now - millions of geospatial data points rendered entirely clientside via WebGL.