iirc, -vesa got kinda bad after the advent of the "GPU". Cards didn't natively support VBE and emulated a subset of it just for compatibility purposes.
It's gotten worse these days. I don't know if I'd call it a bad thing though - with the push for hardware accelerated rendering to help with battery life on portable devices, many of the desktop environments have lost support for "software" graphics. They instead depend on software OpenGL support via llvmpipe and chug hard even on modern devices (if you don't have a driver installed) and VMs.
