There was a time where increased clock speeds, or more generally increased processor throughput was important. I can remember when computers were slow, even for things like browsing the web (and not just because internet connection speeds were slow), and paying more for a new faster computer made sense. I think this time period may well have lasted roughly until the "GHz era" or thereabouts, after which even the cheapest, slowest, computers were all that anybody really needed, except for gamers where the the solution was a faster graphics card (which eventually lead to GPU-computing and the current AI revolution!)
You're conflating a few things here. The Vista era was the biggest requirement hit. That was the time where people really needed a faster PC to continue browsing. Before that, you could get away with XP running on a sub-GHz processor.
That's not how I remember recent history because Linux was already pretty good before microslop XP came out. I've been daily driving cheap junk ever since, no regrets.