Of course it requires a lot of RAM and CPU power and GPU power and...
Luckly, there are a shitload of options out there that use a lot less resources.

The consumer should be aware and buy things that are not in this situation.
And yes, everything you listed has some instances where the vendor's will override the consumer will. cars with components that are locked behind payment and can be disabled remotely, televisions that display advertising, game consoles that can do things like deleting games you own, security cameras that just go to shodan (the website), lightbulbs that require you to use your mobile device to "register"...
Not saying that EVERY CAR etc.. but there are examples of specific devices doing all that.

Your wallet is tiny next to the investors and shareholder's wallets

If you're buying a online computer you can't control what is installed on it, you should expect it to not work for you.

I did read somewhere that color was a massive kludge on it as well, due the original being very hard coded for B&W

Looking here, it do emulate a 16bit CPU, but i imagine, even via emulation, you're getting a CPU that is a hundred times faster than an actual 386 of that era.

Much of the Win95 compatibility depends on 16bit code, which is not available on the 64bit mode regardless of windows or linux.At this point, your best bet is using 86box

The part where the "age check" they will ask 4chan to use is some shady as fuck system to get face scans/ids for every user.
It has nothing to do with children, and it is being pushed on everything at once for a reason or two.

The tech is potentially good, but the way nvidia used it was pretty horrible, getting characters that are purposefully stylized and doing these terrible "what if mario was real" kind of hell.
A game made with this from the ground up, with the NN trained to draw the character faces and all that would be awesome, but it was of really bad taste how they shown it.

People that can't see the value in his art and think that the system should prevail no matter what.

It's mostly about the terrains and houses being "boomer NFTs", rather than the cost of building new ones.

The current president threatened to bring it back, but i don't think ANYONE liked the idea, even his political base.

For a florida woman that is.
You would expect one to be arrested releasing a drunken alligator in a walmart or something.

It's a lot easier to just grow em on a lab than going all the effort of cracking skulls and re-training and all that.
Check the The Thought Emporium youtube channel, he's growing his neurons "at home", and his goal is actually to make exactly what this study did.

Given all the Win11 snafus