sorry to hijack but since you brought it up..
If you want to see some interesting flame wars from the 90s you should probably try to use the wayback machine on 3dfiles.com 's forum.
Man there were some doozies, might even find me in there somewhere calling people names. Another good resource might be seeing how far back you can go with overclockers.com forums using either their current search, or archived site captures. Those guys were the cream of the crop as far as knowledge there and you even had people from companies interacting with the enthusiast community.
As far as how people felt, for my part, I was turned 14 in 1996. At that stage I was transitioning between a 386/DX 40Mhz to a 486 of some 30Mhz design.. all I know is I could run Windows95 on it...sorta.
I missed the boat on Voodoo1 and all that jazz (but I did get to experience owning an IBM PC Jr and Commodore 64).
The pace of rapid hardware improvements was both a blessing and a curse. A lot of those advances were driven by competition, pure and simple. Competition in the enthusiast market, competition in the general consumer market (PC's and the Internet in every home were just starting to boom. You had companies like Dell, Gateway, Compaq, and who can forget our old friends, Hewlett Packard (Packard Bell). Big box pre-built branded systems were starting to really become a thing for the x86 platform.
Most people bought their machine and shrugged their shoulders.. complained how it got slow because they bloated it with stuff, and bought something faster a few years later. Enthusiasts, from my point of view, along with industry rivalry, is what really opened the floodgates on rapid advancement. Enthusiasts were willing to pay top dollar for the fanciest, fastest, best components and in some ways it kind of subsidized development for the lower tiers of the consumer market. I see it as a trickle-down effect. Those advancements that people were paying top-dollar for bragging rights, were refined and reduced in price, for mass production in lower-end models that still made upgrading worth it.
My first 3D card was a Voodoo2 and it blew me a way. I still lament the loss of 3Dfx and the loss of APIs like GLIDE. Glide was a bare-metal API, you could do amazing things at amazing speeds, but that also meant it was proprietary, and that was ultimately what killed it. The key thing to understand about a lot of advancements back then, was that they were brute-force "is it possible to break moore's law" types of advancements. Yes there were legit new technologies along the way, and refinements in efficiency, but the CPU race to 1Ghz, the GPU wars with Core/Memory clocks and overclocking ability. That was all brute force. It was easy to do.
I'm typing this on an Intel i7 6800K. a 6 core CPU with 16GB of RAM and a Geforce ...I don't even remember the name its the 1060 model of whatever is out. 🤣
My CPU is ancient, I bought it when the platform was pretty much dead already. But it works. It works well for video encoding, and my GPU works well for gaming @ 1080p with acceptable image quality and FPS. Sound is irrelevant these days unless you are an audiophile of some sort, or actually buy into Creative Labs marketting snaz
I built this system around 2 years ago during black friday. I think the GPU came a little later. Lots of people play their games on 5 year old machines, even. You couldn't do this in the 90s. Technology advanced so fast for so many reasons, you literally had to upgrade your machine to be able to play a new game coming out that you wanted THAT badly. What some of us witnessed, and what you're trying to find out about, was literally the birth of the modern computing industry.
It was something like the baby boom post WW2. The USA had existed before then, but we didn't really do much. Didnt accomplish much. But then, we won a world war, we came home, our brightest minds went to work and things exploded. The IBM PC based industry kind of went the same way for games, in the 1990s.
That's my brief, personal opinion. you can interpret it for your research however you like.