I can remember the slow loading of Bryce 3D or Photoshop or Office on P133 with a 5400 RPM drive.

The nostalgia is strong with this one.

A t3.small on AWS costs $182.21 a year before any discounts and has 2 CPUs and 2 GB of RAM.

So the computer to run the example at the start costs 3 hours of Engineering time.

This has... Warping effects on how hardware performance is perceived to put it mildly.

If you spend 4 hours halving that cost it takes multiple years to reclaim that investment.

Not that performance doesn't matter of course, reducing your total spend by a percentage is worthwhile, but micro optimizations become difficult when hardware is cheap and performant.

For simplification, you need to make a Spaghetti Bolognese for 4 people.

Person A gets $10, Person B gets $100.

Person A is forced to be resourceful, look around and do a lot of thinking. Person B can be wasteful and still be in budget.

Reality Nowadays: Person B would contract this out to Person C, who would subcontract to Person D and suddenly there is a huge scope creep and $100 is not enough.

I use old software on new hardware

It's faster than new software on new hardware