Looking at average benchmarks, current consumer CPUs are about 20x faster than in 2007-2008 [0]. That means games like Call of Duty 4 and Crysis. Likely not much more online chess than today. And in tflops the RTX 4090 is 20x faster than the GTX 970 from just 10 years ago. But it's easy to overlook that progress if you just look at the performance of the average app.

[0] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html

Sounds right to me. Without being able to rely on flashy visuals and low-latency so much, games would've had to be somewhat more strategic and intellectual to sell (although I imagine graphics would eventually catch up due to its fitness for parallel processing). Even if brain rotting visual spectacles were just pushed 7 years down the line, they still would probably have a more sophisticated flavor that might be cemented with time (e.g. this counterfactual TikTok might have given users much more direct control over their feed algorithm).

Everything is optimized for efficiency, size and speed. Like it was in the early days. With sparkles in creativity for finding a way to achieve O(n)

I think the only solution to the problem is to keep the memory and disks space very low.