It was definitely aided by Segwit. You can argue it was worth whatever advantage Segwit brought, but "spammers" were given a massive discount (tbh not even sure if we should call them spammers since they paid the fee which *is* the spam deterrent mechanism). Without Segwit it would've made it not possible, reduced it, and/or made it significantly shorter. 

Anyone could easily say "I'm not running no 700+ gigabyte node". Why not 100kb blocks then? 10kb? It would make nodes cheaper to run and more decentralize.

5-7 to 50-70 tps, 10x, is huge for current users for the forseeable future wdym?