What emerging players? You can’t just whip up a competitive GPU in a jiffy, even if you have Intel money.

Also, unless they are from a different planet that has its own independent supply chain, they’d have to deal with the very same memory shortage and the very same foundries that are booked out for years.

Gaming laptops are notorious for dying from overheating. These things need to be meticulously maintained if you want to use them for their intended purpose for long.

Which is totally fine. Not every game has to support older hardware. Games are allowed to use “newer” tech.

Worth noting that I played Indy at 1600p/60 on an RTX 2080, which is a card from 2018 that I bought used for 200 bucks two years ago. This card can still run every single game out there and most of them extremely well, despite only having 8 GB of VRAM.

The whole debate is way overblown. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t games that could run a whole lot better, but overall, PC gamers with old hardware are still eating good.

This heavily depends on the game. Which game were you testing?

In my experience at least, small Indies and last-gen or earlier ports from console are fine, but games with frequent loading times and those designed for SSDs benefit from being installed to the internal storage.