My single 996 MEGAhertz processor, 512mb ram, 128mb vram setup could just about run Battlefield 2, Counter Strike Source, and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory. These games often had higher minimum requirements but I managed.

Balatro, a modern card game, starts off with minimum requirements of two 3 GIGAhertz cores and a gigabyte of ram.

Comparing AAA Valve with an indie dev isn’t fair but it’s objectively true that relatively simple concepts now require substantially more resources. That’s like 6 Battlefield 1942 instances to 1 Balatro instance.