It was never needed. What was needed was to increase the max block size.

Instead, new people took it over and kept the throughput to the rate of a 56k modem. Now for the cost of a single transaction you can pay for enough hard drive space to hold the entire chain and enough bandwidth for a billion transactions.

This is like building a sidewalk instead of a freeway then saying you need to build a network of gondolas over it that just plunks groups of people down at different places on the sidewalk to move people.

Ah, yes, I'm very aware of that fact, my use of "needed" here was in the sense it was needed after all the ones making money from transaction fees took over and decided to not increase the block size.