I've had very similar experiences myself.<p>For most <i>local</i> applications, or simple over-the-Web fetches via curl, wget, etc., mid-aughts hardware <i>or earlier</i> often suffices.<p>Amongst my hobbies are occasional large-scale scraping of websites. I'd done a significant amount of this circa 2018-19 on a mid-aughts iMac running Linux. One observation was that <i>fetching</i> content was considerably faster than <i>processing</i> it locally, not in a browser but using the html-xml-utils package on Debian. That is, DOM structures, even when simply parsed and extracted, provide a significant challenge to older hardware.<p>I had the option of expanding RAM, and of swapping in a solid-state drive, both of which I suspect would have helped markedly (swapping was a major factor in slowness), though how much I'm not sure.<p>I'll also note as I have for years that <i>this behaviour serves advertisers and merchants as a market segmentation technique</i>. That is, <i>by making sites unusable on older kit</i>, in a world where physical / real-estate based market segmentation isn't possible, <i>is an effective way of selecting for those with discretionary income to buy modern devices</i>. Whom we presume have greater discretionary income / higher conversion rates as well.<p>(Multiple network round-trip requirements is also a way to penalise those making access from distant locations, as those 100--300 ms delays add up with time, particularly for non-parallelisable fetches.)<p>I'm not arguing that <i>all</i> site devs have this in mind, but at the level which counts, specifically within major advertisers (Google, Facebook) and merchants (Amazon) this could well be an official policy which, by nature of their positions (ad brokers, browser developers, merchants, hardware suppliers) gets rippled throughout the industry. In the case of Apple, moving people to newer kit is their principle revenue model as well.