Not sure if being sarcastic .. Expectations might have increased , quality hasnt.
A few pretentious programmers wanting fast hardware to play with is one thing, but demanding it and proclaiming that programmer productivity has increased and thus all programmers deserve the best possible hardware is laughable at best.
Anyway, fixating on HW like it has meaning outside of the software that runs is a common misconception, and assuming there is any reason to buy a PC with less than 200$ of ram is simply premature optimization. Today that works out to 16GB, in the past that may have been less than 16KB, but that does not mean 16KB was enough just that it was a point of diminishing returns.
PS: Assuming that the same assumptions will always apply even as HW gets 1000 times as fast is ridiculous. I know someone that prevented 1 million in computing hardware from being purchased due to a few weeks work. Today doing those same optimizations would be a waste of time because computing power has literally increased by that much.