There's no such thing as a trivial change to the bitcoin consensus rules, especially when that change requires everyone to upgrade their software at once on pain of financial loss. We're talking something that's never been done before in the entire history of Bitcoin.
Also, running a full Bitcoin node on a machine with a spinning rust disk and a relatively small amount of RAM is going to be hell - especially if that disk is heavily shared - because it has to do a lot of random reads from the chain state DB in order to retrieve outputs referenced by the transactions, with the number of reads scaling linearly with the block size. I think some of this may be skipped during the initial block download these days, but you can hit 1 minute plus per block easily just with the existing block size limit. It looks like the hosting provider he chose has some kind of SSD cache of unspecified size which might have helped, if everything fitted in it.
Also, running a full Bitcoin node on a machine with a spinning rust disk and a relatively small amount of RAM is going to be hell - especially if that disk is heavily shared - because it has to do a lot of random reads from the chain state DB in order to retrieve outputs referenced by the transactions, with the number of reads scaling linearly with the block size. I think some of this may be skipped during the initial block download these days, but you can hit 1 minute plus per block easily just with the existing block size limit. It looks like the hosting provider he chose has some kind of SSD cache of unspecified size which might have helped, if everything fitted in it.