The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

I mean, if you put win 95 on a period appropriate machine, you can do office work easily. All that is really driving computing power is the web and gaming. If we weren't doing either of those things as much, I bet we could all quite happily use machines from the 2000s era

I do have Windows 2000 installed with IIS (and some office stuff) in a ESXi for fun and nostalgia. It serves some static html pages within my local network. The host machine is some kind of i7 machine that is about 7-10 years old.

That machine is SOOOOOO FAST. I love it. To be honest, that tasks that I was doing back in the day are identical to today