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.

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.

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.