The title might be hyperbole (intentionally), but the observations are more or less in line with what I experienced through a few the Big Data initiatives over the years under different enterprise environments (although I have reservation about the one 1%er comment). To me, Big Data was never about how "big" the data was, but more about the tools/system/practice needed to overcome the limitation of the previous generation. From that perspective, yes, the "monolith" may be having a "coming back" for now due to the improvement of underlying single node performance. But I do think Data size will keep growing, everything needed to make Big Data work would still be there when the pendulum swings back where a single node can't handle it anymore.