The problem often times isn't the hardware, it's the software that gets ever more bloated.
Was a 486 capable of surfing the internet, playing games, talking to people, writing code, etc? Certainly!
Was a Pentium 3 capable of surfing the internet, playing games, talking to people, writing code, etc? Certainly!
Are either of those capable of doing it on the modern world? No - and it's not because they're slower than what they were, it's because the complexity of software and data has grown massively.
Consider that the current CNN homepage is about 27MB of assets - half of a Win95 install.
You want to stop obsoleting stuff, buy every web developer and every Google employee a Raspberry Pi 4 with NVMe storage, and make them use it.