Hey any time man!
Yeah I am a bit younger, but I dove head first into all things computer at a young age, so I completely agree with you that the mid to late 90s were... yeah, magic, just... incredible leaps and bounds being made by tech, there was a real optimism back then.
I was losing games of Starcraft in 98/99 because mom or dad picks up the phone, 56k modem now earrapes them and i get connection lost lol.
Trying to play Half Life 2, a few years later, on the same shitty eMachine... the computer could not handle the scene with Alyx being teleported in the intro / first level.
The uh, screen negative effect, plus the streaking emmisive particle blurs, every time it would crash so hard I would have to repair windows/defrag the drive.
What worked, was to stare at the floor that whole scene. That way you only get the screen negative flash effect, without the particles on top.
But yeah like, the leap from HL1 and like, Goldeneye style graphics, to HL2... fucking mind blowing.
Nowadays its all unoptimized UE5 garbage that actually looks worse in many instances than better optimized and more cleverly rendered games from 5 to 10 years ago.