Nvidia GPUs enable nothing, because you can't buy any at reasonable prices.
The researchers are using things like the DGX or RTX A-series. These, while quite expensive, are not that unreasonable when it comes to pricing.
Even for ML model training back then, 8GB was on the small side (a lot of the research repos even had special parameter sets to allow running on consumer level VRAM GPUs). Also, for something like long running bio simulations, you'd probably want to be sure that your memory bits aren't being flipped by other sources -- the extra upfront cost is well worth preventing potentially wrong research results...
Nvidia consumer products have been a better value proposition in the past for sure. But they've always done market segmentation. It's not merely a matter of "datacenter-approved(tm) GPU" (though they do also do driver-based segmentation).
Fry: Nobody in New York drove, there was too much traffic.