Teaching my daughter to program on a modern computer, we spend more time bootstrapping and in process, than we do in actual development.
Getting knowledgeable people costs money so we build more abstractions that lower the cost of development and pass the costs of development from the company to the user in the form of requiring more hardware to do the same thing.
How come I need 16Gb of RAM these days when 8Gb did it yesterday? How come my phone needs 4Gb of RAM while my 2012 tablet had 1Gb? Sure the hardware is cheaper but we're still not using the hardware to it's fullest.
Before that, my 64MB RAM 100mhz Pentium could usually have a couple things open before it'd hit swap too badly. I'm talking like Word and a web browser, not calc and notepad. None of the equivalent programs to those can even open all on their own in a footprint smaller than 64MB these days, let alone with other programs and the OS in the same space. Hell, how many operating systems fit in that with a GUI as capable and usable as, say, Win98se (let alone something really incredible on the performance front, like BeOS)?
I can now use simplenote, discord, slack, the jetbrains dev suite, visual studio code, and this is without including separate developments like Steam, which has made it effortless to switch between Windows, Linux and Mac.
That being said, I still consider Mac OS the superior OS (this call home issue from the article aside), mostly because the font rendering still works better after all these years, Windows and Mac still have better quality software available for them, and Mac still does not have the forced updates as Windows does. Also I have noticed that in Ubuntu, some electron apps like Simplenote, the copy and paste of text is funky at times, like not even letting me select stuff.