The search limits are surely mostly from limits on energy and compute costs.
The better analogue is "Imagine in the 70's being able to teletype into an insanely expensive compute infrastructure and have reasonable timesharing capabilities of a limited resource across multiple users."
Unix. I'm describing the motivation for Unix there.
We already look back on earlier times with constraints that were appropriate.
Presumably compute will get cheaper, we'll build more datacenters, maybe we'll even power them in a way that doesn't destroy our planet, and GPT questions will become too cheap to meter. Just give it some time.
