There's something to this. The 200-400MHz era was roughly where hardware capability and software ambition were in balance — the OS did what you asked, no more.

What killed that balance wasn't raw speed, it was cheap RAM. Once you could throw gigabytes at a problem, the incentive to write tight code disappeared. Electron exists because memory is effectively free. An alternate timeline where CPUs got efficient but RAM stayed expensive would be fascinating — you'd probably see something like Plan 9's philosophy win out, with tiny focused processes communicating over clean interfaces instead of monolithic apps loading entire browser engines to show a chat window.

The irony is that embedded and mobile development partially lives in that world. The best iOS and Android apps feel exactly like your description — refined, responsive, deliberate. The constraint forces good design.

Lots of good practices! I remember how aggressively iPhoneOS would kill your application when you got close to being out of physical memory, or how you had to quickly serialize state when the user switched apps (no background execution, after all!) And, or better or for worse, it was native code because you couldn’t and still can’t get a “good enough” JITing language.