Nobody wants it. It would be great if we could just run an arbitrarily large RDBMS as one node.

Sadly, hardware has limits, especially if you use cheap(er) virtual hardware. OTOH you can see Stackoverflow pulling just this trick: a single colossal SQL server handles most of the load [1]. They, of course, run two DB servers because they need a hot spare.

[1]: http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/3/3/stack-overflow-arch...

But as the article mentioned, NewSQL is already there. DBs in this category has actually been awhile. I think Spanner's paper was 10 years ago. And it is ubiquitous across Google. So let's just accept that we should think things differently in 2022. Distributed RDBMS is already a thing, used in production, in many companies. Like TiDB(https://github.com/pingcap/tidb) mentioned in the article, Square already uses it to replace some MySQL's use cases (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjqL50qzy3A).