Yeah this aligns with my view. Limitations breed ingenuity, and that isn't limited to demo scene outputs. You're going to run into scaling problems sooner or later, and they're a lot easier to deal with early than late. If your software runs well on a raspberry pi[1], it's going to be absurdly performant on a real server.

It's actually how we used to build software. It's why we could have an entire operating system perform well on a machine like a Pentium 1 with most of what you'd expect today, etc. while at the same time we have web pages that struggle to scroll smoothly on a smartphone with literally a thousand times more resources across all axes. The Word 95 team were constantly faced with limits and performance tradeoffs, and it very clearly worked or did not.

If I had just gone and added more RAM (or whatever), I would still have been stuck with an inferior design, and soon enough I would need to buy even more RAM. The crazy part about this change is that it isn't just reducing the resource utilization, it's actually making the system more capable, and faster because free RAM means more disk caching.

[1] e.g. this runs on a single pi, and is much faster than production wikipedia because it doesn't permit updates: https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/article/Hacker_News