I lived through that era too, it was wild to see how quickly x86 dethroned sparc (even Intel's big misses like Itanium were only minor bumps in the road).
Those days, you had to carefully architect your infrastructure and design your workload to deal with it, and every hardware improvement required you to reevaluate what you were doing. Hence novel architectural choices.
Everything is way easier for normal sized organizations now, and that level of optimization is just no longer required outside of companies doing huge scale.
