This feels like a very elaborate way of saying that doing O(N) work is not a problem, but doing O(N) network calls is.
Rather I think their point is that since O(N) is really X * N, it's not the N that gets you, it's the X.
It being so obvious, why is sqlite not the de facto standard?
IMO the page is concise and well written. I wouldn’t call it very elaborate.
Maybe the page could have been shorter, but not my much.
As another example, a SQL Server optimization per https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/statements/set-n...:
> For stored procedures that contain several statements that don't return much actual data, or for procedures that contain Transact-SQL loops, setting SET NOCOUNT to ON can provide a significant performance boost, because network traffic is greatly reduced.