The conversation’s context is fun games without needing the latest hardware.

Look at anything from publisher New Blood Interactive on Steam for a starting point. Mostly retro style FPS from differing eras, but there are a few other game types. Plus you'll struggle to find any that don't have thousands of user ratings in either very positive or overwhelmingly positive brackets.

Gloomwood (first person stealth) and Fallen Aces are a couple of gems still in early access.

A lot of fun old AAA games run on potatoes. And there's so many of them that you won't have issues finding something new to you.

The majority of my indie titles run on a potato.

Many indie games use Unity and have terrible performance. Source: I have a potato (by which i mean i use the integrated graphics of an i7-56xx)

It can run many games well, so it depends how much developers value performance.

As a player, I do not really value performance unless we're talking sub 25fps.

Performance is not just a simple number. 25 FPS with good frame pacing is much more enjoyable than something that averages 60 FPS but with individual frame times all over the place. That said, for first-person action games especially on a non-tiny monitor, anything below ~40 FPS will be noticeably non-smooth. Other game types have more tolerance, e.g. a top down strategy game could still be playable at ~15 FPS.

Same. But some titles have like 3fps (Train Valley World for example)

> I look forward to an eventual return to fun video games

They weren't saying they wanted games that run on old hardware. It's just the trope of "back then hardware was bad and games were good. Now hardware is good and games are bad."