If the question is small balls, the answer (to me at least) is 1114. Perhaps their manipulator wasn't as fast as 40's, but they had something that let them get metric tons of balls up in the high goals.
The balls you see in the foreground of that picture are all from just one goal. There were plenty more where that came from.
That said, the more consistent setup seemed to be the lifted-basket approach of Checkmate, Vexy Things, SHIRT, and so on. With a fast-enough pickup mechanism and a large-enough hopper, field ownership was not impossible.