That’s not true in many domains where doing it on a personal computer would be either too long or too long in asfar as you are are skillful as using faster memory as cache.
video production, climate simulations, pdes, protein folding, etc etc
I agree with you; all of those needed vastly more computing than was available in a PC. If anything, the power of modern hardware has made a lot of it more available in personal workstations. Though it is true that hyped-for-the-masses personal computing devices are not optimized in that direction. You get what you buy.
Likewise it made neural nets trainable on home PCs, at sizes that weren’t in the past. Unfortunately for GP as well as for many people in disciplines I quoted, problem sizes grew farther, esp now that compute+electricity directly translates to cash.
video production, climate simulations, pdes, protein folding, etc etc