I wouldn't say the quote is garbage, there's truth to the idea that over time we have to worry a little bit less about cleverly dealing with resources, assuming

I wouldn't say the quote is garbage, there's truth to the idea that over time we have to worry a little bit less about cleverly dealing with resources, assuming the amount of resources we care about remains static... But of course they don't. The really interesting thing about the quote is that it is from 1986 but could have been stated the same way in 1996, 2006 and likely in 2016 with the same "10 year back" qualifier and nobody would bat an eyelash. Systems are way more powerful but we're also pushing a LOT more data (in terms of depth of the data, breadth of the data, and types of data). To be fair though, these days a lot of people see "spin up 25 more AWS instances" as a perfectly valid way of solving a bottleneck when compared to months of developer time whereas back in 1986 the decision would be a no-brainer in the other direction given that the equivalent of spinning up 25 AWS instances today would be economically infeasible back then for almost any commercial entity (even if you scaled back the amount of processing needed to fit in the context of that era).