I remember downloading demos from Pouet and testing them out on my machine. I quickly realized some of these only worked on higher-spec'd machines than mine, and some of them were laggy and glitchy af, but they still worked.

What I gathered is that every line of code counts in a demo, and the hardware constraints were a good thing as you had to push the envelope of the hardware. Now people spin up bloated Electron apps on their machines which could be slimmed down substantially if more effort was put into reducing lines of code and all those wasted CPU cycles are embarrassing.

But people have beefy setups that can run Electron and a host of other apps simultaneously, so they don't care to put in the effort anymore.

Always code as if you're coding a demo is my mantra.