Incredible to see people try to spin the wild successes of market based economies as an economic failure.

Hardware is cheap and small enough that we can run doom on an earbud, and I’m supposed to think this is a bad thing?

I can sort of see one angle for it, and the parent story kind of supports it. Bad software is a forcing function for good hardware - the worse that software has gotten in the past few decades the better hardware has had to get to support it. Such that if you actually tried like OP did, you can do some pretty crazy things on tiny hardware these days. Imagine what we could do on computers if they weren't so bottlenecked doing things they don't need to do.