The company behind Blazegraph has been acquired by Amazon, and they turned the software into Amazon Neptune. Since then Blazegraph itself hasn't received anything near the previous care and love, and the bitrot is getting worse. So we are noticing the aches more and more - and it is a bit unclear whether it is scalability or bitrot or both. Since Wikidata was always one of the most demanding users of Blazegraph, we have been relying on the support of its development team to get where we are. It might be that it could scale further - but not without the support. Also, the Open Source version of Blazegraph doesn't support sharding, which means that partially scaling meant buying a bigger machine. This also has come to the point where it isn't feasible anymore.