It's worth looking at this from multiple angles, though.

Intuitively, I'm also extremely said that "workstations" aren't a thing anymore. That there are no professional, well-engineered, powerful Sun or SGI workstations anymore. In a sense, they even felt similar to sports cars: You drooled for them, often from a distance.

On the flip side, I don't miss exactly that: Not being able to afford such a thing, or even if you theoretically could, having to shell out tens of thousands of dollars (not even accounting for inflation yet).

Extremely powerful PCs are now available to nearly everyone who wants one, especially if you take into account that even a 10+ year old dumpster PC does more than almost all these past workstations in several regards.

We'd probably be lamenting the opposite if that wasn't the case. But yes, the shine and magic is mostly gone...

Workstation-class machines are very much available, at workstation-class prices.

You can buy a 64-core 7985WX Threadripper Pro with Nvidia RTX6000 and 256GB RAM for $30k or so.

Upgrade to an A100 if you're in a hurry.

They're not unusual in commercial video and animation, machine learning, and general science/engineering.

TBH you could reasonably class the $4k M3Ultra Mac Studio as a low-end workstation-grade machine for some tasks.