He describes the re-architecturing which was partly motivated by memory usage issues, and the change he made which saved memory, but he doesn't explicitly say "this allowed us to avoid re-architecturing"
There are two types of people in the world. Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data...
The cynic in me wants to blame crippling licensing fees. Have you ever scaled up Oracle? Just typing that question gave me a nervous twitch.
If anything Iād bet he underestimated the labor and opportunity costs.