The hardware specs improved, but the software ate all the gains, so really things stayed pretty much the same for years. The primary advantage of faster CPUs, more RAM, and better GPUs in PCs has been to make it less developer-intensive to write software. Where you needed a team of 10 before, now one dev with Electron or Tauri can knock-up a basic business app on their own.

Alternatively we just run the software in a browser (again, the primary advantage being to the developers, not the user) and need hardware to run 'browser + suboptimal app' instead of 'optimized app'.

Essentially modern dev is doing what Visual Basic did in the 1990s, only more so. The impact of that is we buy faster computers to run slower software at a reasonable speed.

The thing is though, this is all a massive win. The supply of software is by far the most important part of tech. It doesn't matter how fast your computer is if the app you need doesn't exist. We shouldn't change it.

In the old days, the rich didn’t think it was a good idea to burn the atmosphere to produce plausibly deniable child porn.

We are in a blip. It will end when Big AI crashes and we can all go back to running stuff locally (on cheap VRAM).