We have thumb drives that can store petabytes of data?

Or did you mean the "big data" crowd which thought 500GB was noteworthy? I don't think anyone took those serious, neither in 2010s nor now. That was always "small" data

To some degree IMO big data is still a mindset when it might take a day to process your data in a normal SQL query. Some tech doesn't scale to the data size for all use cases, and you need different solutions.