Yeah, even this model[0] i made a few years ago for a game i wanted to make for the OG xbox (which has a GeForce3-like GPU) has ~2230 triangles and the entire first level of Post Apocalyptic Petra is ~5800 triangles, so you could say that even a turn of the century 3D character has more or less the same polycount as an entire 90s level (the game i wanted to make would have many characters on screen so i kept the polycount low but i've heard games having 5-6K character or more - e.g. Kingdom Under Fire had ~10K triangles for the main character and a game like Dead or Alive where there are few characters on screen had 15-20K triangles).

Meanwhile more current games have much higher polycounts, easily going above 100K triangles - e.g. Dante from DMC5, a ~7 year old game, apparently has ~190K triangles and that had to run on the more anemic PS4/XBone hardware :-P (though i'm not sure if it used the full 190K model there or some cut down version).

[0] http://runtimeterror.com/pages/iv/images/1073c7062db40837240...