Back then a new PC was so exciting because upon first boot you noticed it was significantly faster than the machine it replaced. I haven't experienced that from new computers in decades now.
As well as harddisk space. The feeling of just taking the entire old disk and putting it in an "old hd" folder, taking up a tiny corner of the new disk was awesome!
I recently upgraded a computer built in ~2013 to one with 2019-2020 components. Maybe it's because I went from lower-middle tier components to upper-middle tier, but I noticed a very significant performance boost: my NVMe drive boots in seconds (versus ~1 minute with my SATA SSD), and I can build large Rust projects nearly instantly without breaking a sweat (my old AMD FX CPU would turn into a radiator).
On a 386, MS Word would make you sit around for 10-15 seconds looking at the splash screen. Then when you upgraded to a 486, you opened Word and it was like "bing!", you're up and running.
Now with magnitudes more speed and memory available, loading Word is...somewhere in between.
In decades? The switch from mechanical drives to SSDs didn’t offer any noticeable improvement? I don’t upgrade every year but moving from an 8th gen proc to 11th and back again presents a pretty stark contrast.