It's really sad but there's lot of truth in what you wrote. At first I was thinking: "but my compilation keeps getting faster and faster" and "some local AI models are really sweet" but that's not your average PC usecase.
My Core i7-6700K from 2015 still works totally fine. I moved to faster PCs: an AMD 3700X (which the wife now uses) and for me an AMD 7700X. But that Core i7 from 2015 simply just still works (as a proxmox machine, running VMs and containers: no ECC sadly).
And what can bring the AMD 3700X / 32 GB my wife is using to its knees? JavaScript. Fucking Wix and Slack and Canva (? not even sure the name is right) webapps that are dog slow and suck up all the CPUs and RAM.
Situation is so out of control with these JavaScript webapps that I'm seriously considering moving to a "one website / one container with quota" scheme.
After switching my wife from Windows to OS X to Ubuntu and now to Debian, I'm now planning to switch her to Proxmox, install a VM, and have her use containers with CPU and RAM quotas to keep these misbehaving pieces of turds webapps written by totally clueless developers in check.
FWIW I did for me, in the past, when I had that one webapp I was using that would manage to bring my beast of a machine to its knees (forgot which one webapp it was though).
Buying her a faster machine / with more RAM would be pointless: the JavaScript developers are vampires and would find a way to suck up all the CPUs and RAM anyway and have this thing swap to disk as if the early 2000s called.
I don't think a browser deserves to run on bare metal anymore. These things do seriously need to be put in a straightjacket. I think I'll got the container and CPU/RAM quota way again (because in my experience it's much easier to put quotas directly on a container than it is to try to CPU pin / RAM limits on a full browser).
P.S: and that's with serious ad blocking in place...