Yeah, that's the one prominent example but, like you said, also just rather recently. Since "the network is slow, duh" has always been true, I wonder why.
My guess would be that performance improvements (mostly hardware from Moore's law and the proliferation of SSDs, but also SQLite itself) have led to far fewer websites needing to run on more than 1 computer, and most are fine on a $5/month VPS
And stuff like https://litestream.io/ or SQLite adding STRICT mode