[FirmwareBurner]

>What I find truly insane is how we're "wasting" the hardware.

Only if you ignore the business economic realities of the world we live in. Unless you work at hyperscaleres of MS/google/meta where every fraction of percent optimization save millions of dollars, nobody is pays SW engineers to optimize SW for old consumer devices because it's money wasted you won't recoup so you offload it on the customer to buy better HW. Rinse and repeat.

>I had a Pentium 3 w/1GB of RAM, and it was a supremely capable laptop.

Why isn't it supremely capable anymore? It will still be just as capable if you run the same software from 1999 on it. Or do you expect to run 2025 SW on it?