Essentially, I do want to stay with PI-PIII-level hardware at most. Things were much simpler back then and the percepted lags were much lower. If I swap the HDD with an SSD in a typical PII desktop running NT4, everything happens just instantly. I'm not even talking about DOS and clean beautiful text mode/turbo vision interfaces. On my Threadripper I wait a couple of seconds for a text editor or a todo list to start.

My quality of life didn't improve much in the PIV+ era. I can play 4k videos now, but the software is much slower, UIs are ugly and, more importantly, inconvenient because there are no native toolkits anymore, just the browser and it dictates the idioms UI designers can use.

Also I want local-first software which does not pipe all my shite to some shady guys, not unreliable plaintext storages somewhere in over the continent.

I don't want to pay subscriptions for everything. I still can run what I purchased 15 years ago but I don't have the option to own anything in this modern world.