

Go back further back. It is like this ever since gaming on PC is a thing. Doom, Wing commander 3, Quake III, …
You have to go back to when gaming was dominated by the Amiga and Atari ST to find a time when it hasn’t been like this.
I’d say thanks to Indie games, it is actually much easier to have a pleasing gaming life on low specs nowadays.
He was designing software for hobbyists and later for the consumer market, he is not Oppenheimer.
I think assuming that militaries would design/use specific software and not use software for hobbyist was a reasonable assumption.