One of the first "hacker" breakthroughs in my first startup was due to following citations on a paper kind of related to my problem until I got to a paper from '61 implementing the exact algorithm I was needing at the time. Numerical approximations to a gnarly probabilistic problem that would make any engineer proud. Worked like a charm and, in a hardware thousands of times faster than it was designed to run, it was crazy efficient.
Or that RAM is practically endless now. I still remember when I was reading an old pattern recognition paper and they dismissed one simple, elegant solution as "obviously impossible" because they estimated it would need 10485760 KB of RAM. We then bought a server with 128 GB of RAM and shipped their impossible approach in production :) where it's been running nicely for 9 years now.
Is there a name for this phenomenon, where with limited resources humans get more creative? There are still some astonishing technologies that are ongoing today, but much more limited to the early era of computer science.
