Faster hardware is a bad first solution to slow software

Agree wholeheartedly. One thing that is hard to measure but very relevant is, the slower the system becomes, it actually costs much more of developers time. This is exactly the expensive thing you try to avoid at the first place. In my old place they run a Spring server on a super performant cloud but when run locally it takes more than 3mins to start up. No the hot swap does not always work. It sucks