They were quite durable 20 years ago too. It's just back then clock speed and performance was increasing very rapidly and it had a huge effect on the usability of your machine (especially if you were a gamer). You would likely upgrade and retire a working machine for the sake of a drastic performance boost every 3ish years.
Nowadays you could happily be using a 5+ year old i5 for full time development and moderate gaming with no issues at all. I'm personally at 5+ years now and I don't see myself upgrading for quite some time because everything I do still feels very snappy.
But compare that to something like a Pentium I at 75mhz (1994) vs a Pentium III at 1ghz (1999) and the performance difference was crazy. Over 10x the clock rate, but it's not just a "paper" boost. They are so different in performance that you can't even compare them. They are in leagues of their own.