I grew up on atari/nes/snes and so of course almost all of those games (pretty sure all) are written in assembly and are rock solid smooth and responsive for the most part.

HA!

Older games were laggy as all fuck and had very significant input delay.

But ignoring the rose tinted glasses: I DO think there is some element of truth to this: My formative years of online gaming were 56k and an ATI Rage. I probably logged at least a thousand hours of UT at 20-ish FPS and my ping was regularly in the hundreds. I can definitely appreciate lower latency games, but I mostly just need VRR (for screen tearing and the like) and I am set. Whereas one of the younglings from work pretty much can’t play anything below 60 FPS… and we have tested this.