An interesting thought I've also had on this subject is just how much further down the bar we were from "maxxed out" or "high performance" than we are today.
What I'm getting at is basically, you can get away with - comfortably - and depending on your use-case, far older hardware these days than we could say in 2012 or 2002. I think of this as almost foundational for how "overpowered things are now"....
2021 - I'm still running some Core 2 Duo stuff on Win10 and modern Linux distributions and they all run like gangbusters despite being over a decade old. Today, we have things like Ryzen Threadrippers at the top end, and the average PC is a Core i5 or I7 6th-9th Generation, and most people use their phones for everything anyway.
2011 - The baseline at that time would have been a Pentium 4, like my wife was still using, albeit with a 128GB SATA SSD installed (The Dell Dimension 3600 was one of the first Dells with SATA controllers) - with 3GB of RAM. I was running a Pentium D CPU in a 4 year old board with a $345 GPU at the time and that thing would run anything, and heat the apartment doing it.
2001 - Baseline at the time was Pentium II - only just a few years before. Sure, XP would install on a Pentium 90 but the experience was so glacially slow and annoying you'd be better off running Windows 98 SE, which was still a legit and supported O/S. Me? I was running a 10 year old ZEOS 486 DX-33 in a clone case with 8MB of RAM and a 124MB HDD. I got laughed at non stop for my paltry little home-built WIndows 3.1 system I was just starting on....crazy as my now favorite NEC laptops were still going for over $150.00 on E-bay back then as legitimate used portables!
Then it gets more interesting as you get into the 90's....
It seems before the PC became super-mainstream, age did not matter because ALL computers were bloody expensive back then, and so you eked as much use out of your $1500-6000 investment as you could. The further back you go, and the less homes with computers, the more true this is.