For most of my work CPUs form the last decade will work just fine. It’s the memory and, especially, disk IO that kills the performance. SSDs have helped big time.
If you have "unlimited" fast storage, the most technically efficient way to render highly-detailed realistic assets is to underpay a bunch of artists to make a metric ton of highly-detailed realistic assets, then stream them in off disk.
If you don't have that storage, the most efficient way might be to make a smaller number of assets modulated by some technical work, which is more accessible to smaller teams who have one top-shelf programmer but no army of contract artists. Or, the team is forced into a non-realistic art style which gives artists and the industry as a whole more space to design in.
It also means that when you do blow your technical budgets for whatever reason (e.g. nobody upgrades their SSDs for 2 years due to a chip shortage so your median performance projections for release were way off), it starts getting much worse very fast.
Also, games generally don't make good use of extra resources you have. Have 128 GiB ram and plenty of VRAM? In almost all games you're not going to see any less loading screens in most games than someone with 8 GiB ram even in really simple scenarious like going back to the area you just came from.
I can't imagine the thought process that would lead to a statement like that. SSDs are the single best thing to happen to personal computing in the past 15 years. Absolutely no question and not even arguable.