Yes, but that's just because a design goal is for modest computers to be able to fully participate in the protocol, and the low number of transactions was the best they could do. They've also been planning to scale since early days. Here are some of Vitalik's blog posts on scaling back in 2014:
And here's one of his 2021 posts, in which he talks about the importance of regular users being able to run a node, but says a million tx/sec should be achievable:
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/09/17/scalability-part-1-buil...
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/10/21/scalability-part-2-hype...
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/13/scalability-part-3-meta...
And here's one of his 2021 posts, in which he talks about the importance of regular users being able to run a node, but says a million tx/sec should be achievable:
https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/23/scaling.html