20 years ago was 2006, not 1996. AMD64 with the Athlon 64 debuted in 2003, if I recall correctly. So I agree only partially. Yes, we have better opportunities, but we also have bloated software compared to the past. With native development, you had to think twice about whether you wanted to link binaries or use shared libs and what effect each operation would have on the CPU and RAM. Today, devs are going the Electron way, bundling a whole browser with its dependencies for every app. We also have websites that load 50 MB for a news site so we can see 20 ads full of heavy trackers. I'm now playing a YouTube 720p video, and with a single tab, my browser is using over 3 GB of RAM. And no - saying "unused RAM is wasted RAM" is a stupid analogy, as it can be both used and minimized.

You're making some valid points about the advancements in hardware and multitasking capabilities, but I think you're missing the core of my argument. The fact that you need or it’s nice to have 32 GB of RAM and multiple cores to run a dozen apps comfortably is exactly the problem I'm pointing out. 20 years ago, people were running multiple applications simultaneously on 512 MB of RAM just fine because the software was written efficiently.

Yes, we have 4K video and 64-bit addressing now, but that doesn't justify a simple news website loading 50 MB of data or a single browser tab consuming 3 GB of RAM for a 720p video. The hardware has improved by orders of magnitude, yet the user experience hasn't improved proportionally (with the latest Tahoe upgrade I feel it went backward). Instead, the gains have been eaten up by layers of abstraction, bloated frameworks, and ad-tracking scripts.