> There is no price/performance improvement.

Both performance and performance-per-watt continue to improve with each new generation of CPUs.

But that is squandered by piss-poor programming and stupid visual gimmicks.

I had to return to Windows as a daily work platform after a long time away (on Macs). I already knew that it had devolved into a grotesquely defective, regressive parade of UI blunders and deleted functionality... but its actual performance is TERRIBLE. I'm waiting for simple operations that I wouldn't have expected to wait for 20 years ago, even on bog-standard office desktop machines.

You're not wrong. But, I recently did the mistake of upgrading my iPad to version 26 (the liquid glass version). I had a relatively smooth experience on my 6 year old tablet which now runs painfully slowly. Even scrolling through different parts of home-screen lags.

My point being, with time performance might go up. But instead of that making my device faster/long-lasting, developers use that extra performance to cram in more stuff, at the end of which I come out only slightly better if not worse (as is in my case)

You're not wrong, but I was disappointed recently by how well an eleven-year-old Macbook Air still works. I installed NixOS on it, and it's still pretty usable even on modern websites.

An eleven year old computer is still useful, which is kind of cool, but also kind of bothers me in that apparently we haven't made enough progress in software to justify buying new hardware, apparently.