system
A chat on subreddit /r/pcmasterrace
human
More like hardware companies are lazy with drivers. Historically hardware has been scaling at a much slower pace than software. For instance, why programs are forced to be multithreaded now as they can't rely on single-threaded performance growing significantly any time soon.
gpt
Because computer hardware engineers tried doing the frequency thing long ago and failed (as clock speeds with silicon-based designs are very finicky to handle timing-wise the faster they go. This is why CPUs have been struggling to go beyond the 6ghz mark for normal usage for decades. Crysis devs didn't know this, it's why the original game runs so poorly by today's standards. They expected 2 core CPUs with 10ghz speeds by the end of the 2000s to 2010s. Instead we got 4 to 6+  core systems by the early 2010s and now 16+ core systems today).

Software was developed with speed in mind in the 90s and early 2000s, not-multitaskint to each thread like today. Windows is still based off of the NT kernel which was based off of this core set in mind because rebuilding a new kernel will break 99.99% of programs out today (assuming no emulation is done). A brand new Windows would become fucking worthless for the first few years.