[acdha]

A lot of this comes back to higher expectations: we now have much larger displays, color depths, instead of simple bitmap fonts we have much higher-quality rendered vectors with advanced layout systems which can complex scripts, etc. Instead of rendering into a shared buffer, each window has at least one (on OS X, two) full buffers and the whole thing is composited, which is great for responsiveness and visual quality but definitely uses In the 90s, 640x480 was a common display resolution — now Apple recommends that developers ship 512x512 icons.

That's not to say that there aren't decisions to reconsider about code size, resource formats, etc. but I think it's easy to forget how much more behaviour has moved into our default baseline assumptions.