It seems most hardware is geared towards accepting more and more bloated, useless programs to waste power.
If you where sold a computer that worked like it’s supposed to, they would have nothing to sell you. How do I know? All my machines have bootlegged software, I finally replaced my 20yo tower when the power supply itself burned out.
Otherwise efficient videogames will do all sorts of shit intentionally to lag old computers. Even using effects that require like 50-200 copies of the onscreen image when it only needs 2.