In the advent of code, I solved day 23 (the crab and the cups) doing brute force, and even with today's hardware it would have taken many hours, if not days, to complete. A tweak of the algorithm got it down to 0.248 seconds. That tweak required an 4 megabyte array in RAM.

I back ported the solution to Turbo Pascal 7, it used a "file of longint" in place of the array which you can't do in MS-DOs... it finished in about 10 minutes, because I have an SSD. Otherwise it would have been about 50,000,000 IO operations at 10/second --> 50+ days.

We can and do use the heck out of the hardware, but it's not infinite, and there will always be orders of magnitude performance to be gained by seeking and using better algorithms.