And didn’t render millions of polygons at 60+ fps, while having many GBs of assets like textures, so I don’t see how is it relevant.

One could write those programs in a truly inefficient manner in a not too performant language and it would run without problem. Today’s computers are really fast.

The problem is that, instead of the speed of modern computers translating to perceptible performance improvements for normal users, it translates to applications that use more resources.

Whether or not the new features make up for the general perceptual slowness of modern computers is a somewhat open question.

I would agree with you, but in terms of games it is simply not a great example. It may be questionable why would we want photorealistic games when 2D, visible pixels are good enough, but games are not known for being inefficient.

Yet many of the games were more entertaining than many games today.

That’s completely orthogonal.