I don't buy this sentiment one bit. In my opinion this nostalgia is almost entirely unjustified unless your primary metric of "when users mattered" is "software

I don't buy this sentiment one bit. In my opinion this nostalgia is almost entirely unjustified unless your primary metric of "when users mattered" is "software used less RAM and CPU". Which may not even be factually correct from a percentage of available resources perspective. Modern day software applications are far more accessible and usable on average than those of the 90s and 00s. And that's the metric that actually matters. More people are able to do more things with software.