the windows 11 lie of that time. artificially raising requirements and soft-blocking decades of dos-based applications, from accounting to games. and it was pushed aggressively on schools and government agencies under contracts, while retail support for 9x simply disappeared. history does repeat itself
My job at the time was supporting geophysical software running on Unix workstations (Dec, Sun, IBM, HP and others). The end users (mainly geophysicists) had PCs with twin 21 inch monitors (huge CRT monitors) or a smaller unix workstation, often entry level Decstations. The PCs were running NT4 and later Win2000. And they worked very well for that job. Yes, games didn't work worth a blip, but that was really of no importance to us. A high end PC running NT4 was a lot cheaper than an entry level Decstation, and in most cases it was faster. The main expense was the monitors and the special graphics card for running two monitors. Those were the days. The price of oil was high, the company was throwing money at computer equipment like nobody's business, and we all had a lot of fun.
I'm afraid is worse now. At the time Aplle (I mean the current Apple) was not a thing, now Apple (but also google and others) are acting as the bad teacher to MS, and given the amount of money they made MS is more than happy to ape their behavior.