The test is actually not completely meaningless as it illustrates how our modern web frameworks have shifted the bottleneck from the database back to the frontend-nodes again.
That's usually a worthwhile tradeoff (hardware is cheap) but one that a growing number of junior devs don't seem to be making consciously anymore. For them it's just normal to be spending more time per request in the controller code than in the database query. Whereas for many oldtimers it will never cease to feel a little funny...
A side-effect of this trend is that you can't reasonably run your beefy rails-frontend on a mediocre CPU anymore. When latency is dominated by ruby-code crunching on strings then you really want the fastest per-thread performance that money can buy.
That's usually a worthwhile tradeoff (hardware is cheap) but one that a growing number of junior devs don't seem to be making consciously anymore. For them it's just normal to be spending more time per request in the controller code than in the database query. Whereas for many oldtimers it will never cease to feel a little funny...
A side-effect of this trend is that you can't reasonably run your beefy rails-frontend on a mediocre CPU anymore. When latency is dominated by ruby-code crunching on strings then you really want the fastest per-thread performance that money can buy.