Five years ago, I got a 40-inch 4k@60Hz for under $400. I recently got a 43-inch 4k@60Hz for $450. The new one is lighter and somewhat more color accurate. I don't get the obsession with small pixels; my eyes prefer if I stand/sit a bit further from a bigger monitor, and it's great for pairing/teaching.

I spent a while with a 27" 4K monitor. It looked nice in HiDPI modes on my Mac, but I didn't get that much usable screen real estate (I was running it about 1440p). When the pandemic hit and I started working from home every day, I upgraded to a 43" 4k display. I now have the equivalent of 4x 21.5" 1080p displays, which is far more usable than 1x 1440p, even if it doesn't look quite as nice.

Progess is being made specially in lower and medium range of monitors.

Apple took a large leap into giant monitors with high DPI. Most people don't care a lot about it, when you are not that close to the monitor, the retina effect is not worth, for mass market, the cost difference.

In the end, you are both correct. It is slow for the top of the line but super fast for everyone else upgranding mid-range monitors.

GPU is a bad example. Models purchased in 2016 cost slightly more than that now, secondhand, after 5 years of usage.

If you take into account pandemic shortages / price inflation, of course.

But a current $500 (MSRP) GPU thoroughly spanks a 5 year old $500 GPU. Even my 2 year old Radeon 5700xt is feeling out of date.

A current-generation $500 MSRP GPU is actually selling for no less than $900, and it's not due to inflation or the pandemic—it's due to cryptocurrency.

I thought crypto’s impact on GPUs largely ended, as they moved into far greater cost/efficiency ratios provided by ASICs? Is it for the non-bitcoin cryptos?

Yes, bitcoin mining has long been unprofitable on GPUs and is low-profit with ASICs. But most newer cryptocurrencies are designed specifically to be hard to make affordable ASICs for, usually by requiring GPU-like memory bandwidth. If you participate in a mining pool like NiceHash, your GPU will likely end up being put to work mining something like Monero but the pool will pay out in bitcoin.

For casual miners, they can use mining pools to make money that still pay pretty well. Gamers especially, are buying these cards and then joining a mining pool when not playing games to recoup some of their money.

This unfortunately leads to a cycle of more mining, even if the card isn’t optimized for it, as no card is a net negative cash flow atm even factoring in energy costs.