The implications of your post was that caching used to have a more significant effect than is the case nowadays.
Memory is cheaper now so it is easier to just push the envelope to the point that your image fits into memory completely. In my post above, I pointed out that the best virtual performance comes if you have all of the process in memory. If you can afford that much memory, you never have to wait for a page-swap. And at that point, virtual demand paging has a lot less to do. (Still never quite zero because of all of the frimpin' Windows Services that clutter up memory and then promptly go idle.)
Consider that in the days of MS-DOS, a machine with 640KB was the biggest memory you could have due to memory bus size and segmentation limits. (They called it "partitioning.") As recently as Windows 3.1, physical memory was still limited because Windows "rode" DOS, so the limits still applied. Bigger memory was possible but you needed extra software acting as a memory-control-register driver. Using that kind of memory driver, the biggest memory I ever saw was 2 GB as an upper limit. It actually took the advent of Windows NT to break that barrier "for real." Even then, you had the limit of 4 GB of physical memory (of which a fraction was never usable). But now it is a few hundred bucks to get 16 GB of RAM. If you are using 32-bit Office, the implications are that you eat about 3-5 GB for Windows and ALL of its junk, then with 11 GB of RAM you can have a 2 GB Access DB, a very large spreadsheet, a huge Word document, and a PowerPoint presentation ALL active at once, with Outlook in the background, and NONE Of them would be swapped out or paged out.
Another factor is that caching STILL has a TREMENDOUS effect - but it is not obvious to you because it is not out in front any more. That's OK, I can tell you how to find out about it. Modern machines have hardware caches, usually called the L1, L2, and L3 caches - that hold frequently referenced items from memory in a part of the memory circuitry that is electronically closer to the CPU than the memory bus interface. You can look these up if you wish, but basically they are INVISIBLE caches that really shine when you have relatively small program loops. If you are using Win10, call up Task Manager and call up the performance page, click on the CPU performance option (left margin), then look to the lower right. It will tell you what size you have for the physical memory caches. (Or at least it does so on my system.) You can also click on the Memory performance option, to see some things that relate to how much more you can fit into the sardine can. Look for the COMMITED number, which is a fraction. That number is, in essence "what you use/what you COULD use" on your machine.
Then, if you REALLY get curious, from the bottom of that page you can call up Resource Monitor. Call that up and select the Memory tab. The nomenclature that they use has changed a bit over the years. They have a "Modified" component that represents the modified page list, and it is usually relatively small. Their "Standby" component is part of what I am calling the "Free Page List." You will also see "hardware reserved" memory which is related to non-swappable parts of memory that are tied to interrupt handling and the physical segmentation registers. There is also the "In Use" section, which is memory that is currently allocated to a specific process. You might actually see something called "Free" but in this context, I believe it is physical memory that has never been used or for which the contents were invalidated by process exit, and therefore do not hold anything in "Standby" status.
If you look up the topic "Windows Paging Dynamics" you would realize that the Free Page List and Modified Page List (taken together) are ALSO a form of cache. If you paged out of memory to the swap file (virtual memory file), then you have to come out of the page file to be back in memory again. But if you were merely remapped to the Modified Page List preparatory to being outswapped, your memory segments can be reclaimed from the MPL. And if you were written out to the swap file BUT the memory pages hadn't been overwritten, Windows remembers what was last there and just remaps you to those pages rather than reading them in. (That's the magic of modern memory management hardware.)
All of those things I just mentioned are more modern forms of caching as applied by the Windows O/S or CPU hardware, usually transparently. Which is why it only "seems" that it is less effective.