I think this is a major factor. A lot of the hardware gains over the that period have been used by developers to make their own lives easier.
When I was in university made a small 2d game engine in J2SE. Performance wasn't great, so I had to use sprite sheets, pallette swaps, masking 256 color images etc just to make things playable in most cases.
When I graduated I decided to get into mobile development, to my surprise doing things like just dumping a bunch transluscent PNG's into the workspace were recommended in the docs. Seems like the web had a similar trajectory.
When I was in university made a small 2d game engine in J2SE. Performance wasn't great, so I had to use sprite sheets, pallette swaps, masking 256 color images etc just to make things playable in most cases.
When I graduated I decided to get into mobile development, to my surprise doing things like just dumping a bunch transluscent PNG's into the workspace were recommended in the docs. Seems like the web had a similar trajectory.