Travel to Africa, India and South East Asia some time. The world is a big place outside of California, and the hardware available to many is not what you'll find at a cafe in San Francisco.
The RPi is an example of a growing SOC device market, but I did mention as well the enormous install base of older and under-powered devices in general.
I don't live in California (nor the US), I've only visited twice or so.
I'm from a place similar to those you're describing.
Few people would get enthusiast gear like Raspberry Pi. What they would get, instead, would be an old x86 PC with pirated Windows. A crummy knock off Chinese laptop or locally assembled PC (so not from the big OEMs).
Not quite. Even rather poor people in poor countries can get PCs with decent computing power, as PC performance plateaued circa 2010 and old PCs are really cheap. You don't need to get something 20-25 years old when something 5-10 years old is maybe 20% more expensive and a lot more powerful.
You're talking about computers from 20, 20+ years ago and about Raspberry Pi.
It's a personal choice.
You can get a good second hand desktop from 2012-2015 for the price of your Raspberry Pi.