You are totally right. I worked as admin on few projects with dedicated servers, and ALL have two classic peaks (~10:00, 16:00..19:00) and near zero consumption at night (00:00..06:00), all these are now very close to civilian power consumption :) .
Some time, before CDN invention, very large sites distributed traffic between few time zones around world and so they distributed load for a whole 24h. But when CDNs appeared, local peaks returned.
And unfortunately, not much things possible to run at classic DC environment, nearly only ML tasks. For example, for classic supercomputing tasks, typical DCs have too slow network (too large latency for things like C++ MPI).
Some time, before CDN invention, very large sites distributed traffic between few time zones around world and so they distributed load for a whole 24h. But when CDNs appeared, local peaks returned.
And unfortunately, not much things possible to run at classic DC environment, nearly only ML tasks. For example, for classic supercomputing tasks, typical DCs have too slow network (too large latency for things like C++ MPI).