I haven’t thought about it in a while but the premise of the article rings true. Desktops are overall disposable. Gpu generations are only really significant with new cpu generations. CPUs are the same with real performance needed a new chipset and motherboard. At that point you are replacing the whole system.
Is there a platform that challenges that trend?
Everything in this post is wrong, actually. But if you buy shit parts to build your desktop, you’ll have a shitty desktop.
Simple answer is at the motherboard level - you look at your motherboard’s future expansion capability and if you started with a good foundation you can do years of upgrades. Also your computer case needs to be big enough to fit extra stuff, full ATX motherboard size is great.
For example I have a VR gaming rig that runs VR games well on DDR3 RAM and a Sandy Bridge CPU, because it has a decent modern GPU and enough CPU cores + RAM.