I don't think the price of equipment helped either. Why would you need to be efficient when you can just throw more and faster cores, memory, and storage into the mix without incurring a huge overhead and while staying competitive in the consumer markets? If an 8 core, 3.6ghz i11 with 8gb DDR4 and 2TB Sata III SDD cost $1 Million, programmers would rethink their approach to bloated software.

I find it both sad and humorous that I used to run Microsoft office on a 66mhz dx2. 30 years later, and though the speed, resolution, and print quality has improved, the ultimate end of the product remains the same. Words on paper. It really brings into question what all the extra bloat gets the average user.

On a semi-related note, have you seen this project?

https://www.menuetos.net/