There used to be a joint online project to compute these tables in a SETI like distributed system. Everyone who contributed their CPU cycles, could use the tables. And yeah, around 2005-2008.
net-ntlmv1 rainbow tables have been around forever too though, the same attack documented in this blog post has been hosted as a web service at https://crack.sh/netntlm/ for 10+ years
A few years ago i was doing some vm things in azure. Hadnt touched azure before, and spent 10+ minutes of frustration trying to figure out how to get amd64/x86_64 things started, as the only thing i could find was "Azure ARM", and on googling, "arm" here means azure resource manager... ARGH why does microsoft insist on using existing names and acronyms!?!?
I was part of a user study on Azure back when it first rolled out-- they were looking for seniors with an AWS background to participate in UX research, and I remember walking out of that study with imposter syndrome for the very first time. Spent 60 minutes totally unable to do the thing I wanted to do when I was introduced to Azure for the first time, and I remember thinking... am I a fraud?
No! Not this time, at least. In hindsight everything was named and organized terribly and it hasn't improved much since.
Amazing that this is still around and causing someone enough of a headache to justify spending money on.
Also amazing what a teenager with lots of free time and a bootable Linux usb can get up to.