On today's hardware. The point is just to show that modern software is slower and less efficient than older software.

Honestly this is the worst take yet.

Go open that Excel 97 with a spreadsheet containing 65,537 rows.... Oh, you can't.

People aren't building modern software that does the same set of things so attempting to measure it is much more difficult than opening up a zillon year old VM.

How many spreadsheets are that big? And how much bloat do you think supporting that accounts for?

This is an irrelevant question if you're in the business of selling most software.

Most people don't care if their spreadsheet takes 1 second or 10 seconds to open. What they do care about is "Bob sent me a spreadsheet and I can't open it" or "The app crashed and lost all my data" (and technically I've seen spreadsheets crash plenty, but they tend to have a recent copy of the data saved which is eating up resources to monitor and do this). And things like "I want to hit undo 50 bajillion times".

And that is just feature bloat. There is a ton more 'just import a library' for that bloat because adding libraries is generally much easier when it comes to fixes then finding the place in your source code and fixing it.