You raise good points though. This system is significantly safer than best practices (bcrypt(password, 10)), but it has significantly more overhead. There's also diminishing returns here. For a company of Dropbox's size - sure, invest in this. For a company that came out of YC S16, no, don't bother. Just properly bcrypt/PBKDF2/scrypt/argon2 the thing and revisit much later.
I love it, but I would not recommend this system to my clients for password storage unless they had a very mature operations/reliability team.
"Going forward, we’re considering storing the global pepper in a hardware security module (HSM). At our scale, this is an undertaking with considerable complexity, but would significantly reduce the chances of a pepper compromise."