You just described one tier of the n-tier architecture. Yes, modern compute devices are fast. However, those devices that produce that data have to send that data… somewhere back to the company that cares about it. In your model, they would just write it to the company’s database? All 1Billion of them? C’mon. Even if you had a decentralized network capable - you don’t have a compute device in the world capable of handling that amount of traffic. Even if each device processed a chunk, and you had an efficient network to coordinate execution operations, you still need to get that data to its “caller” which would bombard it with interface calls exceeding its sockets.
So I appreciate the lively discussion on how modern consumer hardware is awesome, it’s only on the edge of a vastly bigger compute structure.
Fun fact, most companies don't have 1 Billion customers. Most don't even have 1000. They can have large data due to the subjects they may work on but that data tends to be accessed sparsely(i.e. a SaaS that provides KYC products to 10 regional banks).
Google, Netflix and the few other exceptions probably should stick with the traditional stuff for now but there's a huge number of companies that just don't need those hugely scalable systems and sacrifice flexibility and/or spend resources on problems they don't have.
So I appreciate the lively discussion on how modern consumer hardware is awesome, it’s only on the edge of a vastly bigger compute structure.