> any extra computer power is wasted by software until it performs no better than a computer from 20 years ago

The existence of Doom Eternal disproves this.

In domains where high performance is important to the product's success, such as graphically impressive video-games, computational power isn't wasted. Bloat is tolerated in many other domains, though. Anything made with Electron, for instance.

TGMLC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law

Computers are powerful enough that a reasonable desktop PC these days could host 100K simultaneous web connections simultaneously and still be entirely usable for several other things as well, as long as you are not flagrantly wasteful with them.

That is, static web hosting is an entirely solved problem that no longer requires special hardware.

Just yesterday, I was impressed that my four-year-old laptop could build 8 virtual machines at once, writing 500 MB/s to disk sustained, and I could still use it to compose emails without a significant performance hit.

That kind of thing would have been unthinkable a mere 10 years ago on even the most high-end servers, let alone something you can carry around with you...