Why do I feel tech history is repeating itself?
All the old tricks are new again: smart caching, compression, better data representation, pipelining, etc.
Burning code into a FPGA was for many I/O interfaces: storage and networks.
Made them insanely fast, but you only got one shot to get it right :)
I think by now most people realize that the application and everything beneath it has become abstracted by AI.