I haven’t thought about it in a while but the premise of the article rings true. Desktops are overall disposable. Gpu generations are only really significant with new cpu generations. CPUs are the same with real performance needed a new chipset and motherboard. At that point you are replacing the whole system.
Is there a platform that challenges that trend?
I think the real thing you have learned is that PC upgrades are largely unnecessary. They are only selling new hardware that is better on paper and they need to create compatibility traps to make you upgrade a bunch of other shit to get that incremental upgrade.
I think a lot of people really just fail to analyze if the thing they are going to get is worth the cost. Like if you have a perfectly good DDR4 system is it really worth a thousand dollars to upgrade every component in order to get what, an extra 5 FPS? People are spending a lot of money doing upgrades and expecting to get the kind of improvements you got ten years ago, and its just not going to happen because hardware hasn’t been improving at that rate for a long time.
Even still, there are a lot of components that are not cheap that you can reuse regardless of CPU socket and memory compatibility changes. I’ve used the same PSU and case and drives and network card for a decade. That’s all shit I would have had to pay for over and over again with a different type of system.