The problems you cite here, namely 4k video and Chromium are both arguments in favor of retro computing in my opinion -- Both are solutions looking for a problem that succeed only in perpetuating the churn in hardware, no intrinsic value added, like the 100th re-imagining FPS machine gun splatter fest game. Yawn! :-)
As for Chromium (and by extension all major modern browsers), it's played a pretty important part in making the web a platform to reach pretty much everyone with comparably little effort. A lot of the productivity applications I use day-to-day are web apps, and I guess most wouldn't exist in their anything like their current form if there had to be native Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android apps that people would have to download and install and update and secure (and certainly no Linux app – way too few users to even think about).
To my mind that adds a lot of intrinsic value, at the price of much higher resource consumption, true, but I'd rather have that than the snail pace of innovation and still usually questionable quality we had in the "old days"...
Because your needs grow, and you want to able to do more stuff with it.
A great workstation from 00s won't render your 4k video project or compile Chromium from source in reasonable time, or let you mix an entire virtual orchestra with several dozens of Kompakt sample libraries at all. All of those things are just something you couldn't do on the computer in those days with such fidelity and quality, and now you can, and this is awesome.