Ok, so one the one hand we have one of the most universally acclaimed PC games in history, with a team of amazing programmers and artists behind it and a 40 million dollar development budget, and which represented the cutting edge of what was possible at the time in terms of squeezing every bit of performance out of a machine. On the other we have a one-person hobbyist project that is trying to make a statement about consumerist expectations for more, more, more.

If you're sincere about that comparison then I think you're missing the point.

Being able to run something on fifteen year old machines is still plenty anti-turbobloat. And I suspect the 2010 requirement has more to do with the fact that it's pretty difficult to debug software for 1990s hardware that you don't have (or lack proper emulation for).

And if you go back far enough one reaches a tipping point where supporting old hardware can get in the way of something running on new hardware, especially if we're talking about games, unless we're really careful about what we're doing and test on real hardware all the time. Not very realistic for a one-person side project.