In the last 5-10 years, there hasn't been almost increase in requirements. People can use low-power devices like Chromebooks because hardware has gotten better/cheaper but software requirements haven't kept up. My system from 10 years ago has 4gb of ram - that's still acceptable in a laptop, to say nothing of a phone.
If you're going to expand the time horizon beyond that, other things need to be considered. There's some "bloat" in when people decide they want pretty interfaces and high res graphics, but that's not a fair comparison. It's a price you pay for a huge 4k monitor or a retina phone. Asset sizes are different than software.
I won't dispute that the trend is upward with the hardware that software needs, but this only makes sense. Developer time is expensive, and optimization is hard. I just think that hardware has far outpaced the needs of software.