"Today's tools" do not necessarily allow you to make anything like this. I'd even go as far as to say that an array of ancient hardware and software are the main reason for being able to make a product focusing on compatibility and performance. Not aiming for a moral high ground, but just looking at it practically.

I started Angeldust on my trusty, white MacBook1,1 mentioned in the starting post. Having only an Intel GMA945 for powering a 1280x800 display and trying to get a decent frame rate forces some design decisions. I quickly ran into optimizing for GPU overdraw and resources instead of being bottlenecked by the dual-core Intel CPU.

Then I ported the engine to iPhone 3GS where you get the exact opposite situation: the GPU can push lots of pixels to a 480x320 screen, but the ARM CPU is struggling to keep up. Just this 2006/2009 era combination of hardware alone forced me to be efficient with both CPU and GPU. Eventually I even got the engine running smoothly on a first-gen Raspberry Pi on a 1280x1024 display which is no small feat.

I think if you start from "today's tools" on "today's hardware" it's entirely too easy to consider any older platform inaccessible or obsolete, while if you work the other way around you appreciate the sheer power older devices have when used properly. Then moving onto newer hardware is just icing on the cake and just shows you how ridiculously powerful a modern 6-core Ryzen with an appropriate GPU is.