"a hangover from the days when storage and CPU were too expensive"
Indeed, they are no longer expensive - at least not when compared to their cost fourty years ago.
Unfortunately, in that time we also have learned to use up all the CPU with new OS versions (eh, Borkzilla ?), to no longer really care about our RAM usage and, since disk space is a penny a GB, well we clutter our things with lots of useless data.
All this edge stuff is being implemented willy-nilly, and we are collectively learning the consequences of the absence of planning.
Cloudflare is going to have to revisit its update procedures and its engineers are going to have to revisit their panic intervention process.
Hey, everybody's learning something, so it's all good.