>I’m not sure how this decade is any different than the one that preceded it?
2010, your game has to run on a PS3/Xbox 360. That didn't matter for PC games because all 3 had different architectures. So they were more or less parallel development.
2015, Playstation and Xbox both converged to X86. Porting between platforms is much easier and unified in many ways. But the big "mistake" (or benefit to your case) is that the PS4/XBO did not really try to "future proof" the way consoles usually did. A 2013 $4-500 PC build could run games about as well as a console. From here PCs would only grow.
2020. The PS5/XBX come out at the very end, so games are still more or less stuck with PS4/XBO as a "minium spec", but PCs have advanced a lot. SSDs became standard, we have tech like DLSS and Ray Traced rendering emerging from hardware, 60fps is being more normalized. RAM standards are starting to shift to 16GB over 8. But... Your minimum spec can't use these, so we still need to target 2013 tech. Despite the "pro versions" releasing, most games stlll ran adequately on the base models. Just not 60fps nor over 720p internal rendering.
Now come 2025. Playstation barely tapped into the base' power and is instead releasing a pro model already. Instead of optimizations, Sony wants to throw more hardware at the problem. The Xbox Series S should have in theory limited the minimum spec. But we have several high profile titles opting around that requirement.
The difference is happening in real time. There's more and more a trend to NOT optimize their tech as well (or at least, push their minimum spec to a point where the base models are onl lightly considered. A la Launch Cyberpunk), and all this will push up specs quite a bit in the PC market as a result. The console market always influences how PCs are targeted. And the console market in Gen 9 seems to be taking a lot less care for the low spec than Gen 8. That worries me from a "they'll support 10 year old hardware" POV.
>Have I missed a new “Crysis”?
If anything, Cyberpunk was the anti-crysis in many ways. Kind of showing how we're past the "current gen" back then, but also showing how they so haphazardly disregarded older platforms for lack of proper development time/care. Not becsuse the game was "ahead of its time". It's not like the PS5 performance was amazing to begin with. Just passable.
Specs are going up, but not for the right reasons IMO. I blame the 4k marketing for a good part of this as opposed to focusing on utilizing the huge jump in hardware for more game features, but that's for another rant.