The truth is that a lot of conveniences we take for granted have a cost that adds up a lot. A 4K screen has 17 times more pixels than a 800x600 one, and uses 32 bit color. So the raw size of graphics made for a modern display is around 68 times bigger.
Where before a static picture was acceptable now the norm is a high quality, high framerate animation.
Arial Unicode is a 15 MB font, which wouldn't even fit in the memory of most computers that used to run Windows 95.
Spell checking everywhere is taken for granted now.
And so on, and so forth. That stuff adds up. But it makes computers a whole lot more pleasant to use. I don't miss 16 color video modes, or being unable to use two non-English languages at once without extremely annoying workarounds.