the history of cryptocurrency is a history of projects making that exact claim and being proven wrong over and over again, but surely this time is different.
I have in fact not heard that specific claim much. There was the whole "ASIC-resitance" trend and the projects that did care about it (like Monero) tend to be right in their claims. Ethereum is still to a large extent mined on consumer-grade GPUs.
There is not even any consensus on if this is desirable for PoW chains.
There is not even any consensus on if this is desirable for PoW chains.