I suspect the culprit is not the hardware, but the software.
Back in the day there were very little between the keyboard and the screen, and most of it were either in rom or in ram.
Never mind that unless one were dealing with a big iron or similar, multi-tasking was a big nope.
These days most OSs have 10s to 100s of processes going right after a first boot on a clean install. And all those can trip something at "random" intervals.
Just the other day I replied to a Reddit thread, and told a gamer who experienced periodic frame drops in CS:GO to check the other system processes. He protested that he had nothing else running, but elsewhere in the thread a Task Manager screenshot revealed that Windows 10 Smartscreen Filter was chewing through files and bottlenecking the HDD(a problem I've also experienced).
Basically, desktop Windows has crossed the threshold of "needs SSD" to perform adequately. And in theory that shouldn't impact the performance of an older game, but it does, because what happens next is that the scheduler misallocates process time and throws off everything.
More like desktops in general, and smartphones as well even after the decade long reboot, are running out of actual new stuff to cram in there (in a sense the desktop, bar some security issues, was done with Windows 95).
Thus desktop developers keep adding questionable "quality of life" stuff like file system indexers to justify their continued version releases (never mind avoiding doing actual code maintenance).
Back in the day there were very little between the keyboard and the screen, and most of it were either in rom or in ram.
Never mind that unless one were dealing with a big iron or similar, multi-tasking was a big nope.
These days most OSs have 10s to 100s of processes going right after a first boot on a clean install. And all those can trip something at "random" intervals.