One needs to consider not only CPU, but also RAM, storage, and network infrastructure.
While we may be able to adjust things like block size at some point in the not too near future, a more pressing need is determining a way to address the rate of growth of the utxo set and keep it within a manageable size of commodity hardware to ensure decentralization.
Id be in favor of considering a softfork that imposed a constraint on sizes of outputs being valid such that no more than one of the outputs could not be conceivably spent on its own at the same fee rate of the transaction producing it.