> ... or example right now if you had a $3000 desktop PC (sans cost of monitor) that was built in 2016 it would probably still be a fairly capable Linux workstation.

Oh totally. I've got an actual workstation, with ECC mem, from 2015 and a Xeon with 14 cores / 28 threads (tbh I think that CPU alone was worth more than $2 K back then) and it's still plenty quick. I use that old workstation a server though and my "workstation" is a much more modern AMD 7700X (not the latest or quickest CPU by any mean but it's already quite beasty).