For that number of players getting together, it wouldn’t have mattered as much a few months ago. But the refactor to Gen 12 that’s nearing completion also optimises of the rendering thread to make much better use of multithreading.
The current servers are going to continue to struggle trying to manage the whole system when large numbers of players spread all over the system. That part is mostly dependant on server meshing, which is about to start testing.
However, I would be very surprised if the improvements in performance server side (cloud based) didn’t also help the servers cope in general. that’s a fair point.
The Gen 12 improvements and other recent changes to rendering allow 100 players to stand in one place in a giant ship and not have rendering die down to 1fps. The main source of issues in this test were player flashlights and ship lights bringing down the framerate (they are all handled dynamically). But most players there were getting 15-20fps and more once the ship took off and moved away from the other ships and large city.
That stuff wouldn’t have happened before they started rolling out the new rendering technology.