> Do you think he was just too stupid to do the obvious simple correct thing? Or maybe the problem is actually a bit more complicated?
No, but both hardware and software have changed dramatically since the 1990s. We even have cloud gaming services that run games remotely with very little being done on local hardware. They do currently over-promise when it comes to performance, but it's not unthinkable that we're at (or soon will be at) a point where games don't have to depend as much on the random PC at the player's end of the connection even though that's the way things have always been done.