the good ol days screaming along at 25mhz

I remember playing wing commander on my 386. EMM was almost a requirement. But they got loads done with.very limited hardware (compared to now). Hopefully software and software devs can go back to prioritizing efficiency over bloat.

Next, someone should build a unusably slow but completely accurate transistor-level simulation of the 386 (as they did of the admittedly much simpler 6502) and validate this against it to ensure that it actually is 100% accurate.