It will do you well to remember HN isn't the entire world. For many gamers out there building their first PC is a scary and daunting step.
You really have to rewind to mid 90's pre-Windows 95 in the days before Plug 'n' Play when manually assigning IRQs etc was a thing before the process of building your own PC meaningfully changes in my opinion.
Still, before AGP we had VESA, also around the time of MCA and IBM's attempt to capture some copyright patent control back from the expanding PC market and BIOS clones ("Halt and Catch Fire" Season one well worth a watch if you missed that era in life).
Yes pre Windows 95 was a fine art, from tweaking DOS memory, to optimising windows .ini files and then the fun of having to dial up Microsoft's patch BBS for a TCP/IP stack.
But top-end gaming PC's back then, sure made less noise.
Or possibly you had money to buy higher quality components than I did at the time.
OTOH, before the main consumer storefronts were the kind of flea markets of no-name sellers that used to roll into county fairgrounds every couple months, you could actually find good retailers with not only strong return policies, but also focussed on quality parts with a high S/N ratio in their catalog, that even offered added value (including, e.g., mounting CPU and memory when bought with a motherboard.)
Some of those same places survived, but they don't do consumer retail anymore.
It’s nerve-wracking as hell. Closing the swingarm to hold the CPU in place feels like—as the article’s author points out—you’re 100% about to destroy a really expensive piece of hardware. Installing the CPU cooler was surprisingly difficult, and I only noticed that the pins holding it attached weren’t fully seated because I checked and rechecked the mounting. Every time you plug a cable in there’s a moment of doubt if it’s the right cable or if you’re about to overvolt something and melt it. Even when you’re done plugging everything in there’s anxiety around whether or not you’ve missed something like a fan cable, that will eventually result in an expensive piece of hardware overheating and taking out the entire machine.
The act of pressing the power button when you’re all done isn’t an exciting and satisfying one. It’s a massive surge of anxiety followed by a wave of relief, followed by more nagging anxiety that gradually fades.
Even then you’re not done. After fiddling around in the BIOS for an hour to set things up, I ran a benchmark and discovered that I hadn’t used the right profile for my RAM, and it was only using half of its performance potential. Apparently many other people did this too, because the benchmark showed a graph of others’ performance in comparison and it had two equal-sized peaks: one where it was misconfigured to a slower (but presumably safe for all configurations) speed, and one where it was operating at its published speed. It took a few hours of research to discover something called XMP—which I still have no idea what it is—that apparently allows my motherboard to detect RAM timings in a way that unlocks this performance. I never would have noticed this without the benchmark.
I also noticed that my new NVMe SSD wasn’t performing well. Turns out the heat spreader my motherboard uses actually worsens performance for whatever reason. Simple fix: open the box back up, disconnect cables until I can get to the m.2 slot, and remove the heat spreader. More anxiety follows: am I just killing this expensive SSD?
Every step of the way is like this. I am not a naturally anxious person. I am financially well-off, and easily able to eat the cost of any mistakes. I am extremely technically inclined. Expecting nontechnical people to do this with limited budgets and expensive components is nuts.
Plus, there's still a lot that actually can go wrong. Crappy PSUs and built up static electricity have killed uncountable motherboards and GPUs. Misconfiguring your BIOS can actually kill your components, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly.
GPU hit > 95˚C and is now a several hundred dollar paperweight.
On my latest Asus motherboard, an Asus Strix Gaming, choosing XMP timings with an otherwise mild overclock overvolted the 6850k in a voltage setting I wasn't even aware of (not vcore) in such a way that the CPU died over time - my last build was a 2600k, which is now son's computer (OCed, and working fine).
This happened twice. Computer shop couldn't figure it out and replaced the CPU on warranty. Not Intel's fault, yet they copped it. I should have insisted on a new motherboard as well, very frustrating.
Fortunately I somehow discovered the hyper aggressive setting not too far into my third. I know it is at least a bit degraded, but oh well...
In 3 years I'll try an AMD. ;)
If the argument were "I have other things I prefer to spend time on" then I would completely understand, but rejecting it as too hard seems somewhat lazy unless I'm just overestimating the average person's ability.