Back then strict requirements made sense. Doubling anything made a huge difference. Not so much anymore. Today's AAA games do look marginally better than the AAA games of 5 years ago, but only marginally, and these slight improvements in fidelity have massive computational cost which directly results in worse performance.

I remember very specifically not being able to play a game I was gifted because it needed at least 256mb of ram and the family computer only had 128mb.

I was extremely sad, then after months tried to push my parents to her a new computer. They say that the computer is supposed to have 256mb of ram.

After a while we realized that one of the ram sticks was not properly plugged in.

When games like Half-Life were released im pretty sure most people didnt have a 3d capable GPU

Yeah, Quake 2 recommended a Pentium 133, and that was released two years earlier(the AMD equivalent was released only a year and a half before the game). It required a Pentium 90 which was three years old, but it didn't run smooth from what I remember.

That sort of requirement for a major component today would be considered self-sabotage for most non-vr pc games.

Yeah, imagine the games we could have if this had not stopped because of consoles.

Not saying it was a good development. Just saying it rapidly developed game graphics and systems.