They were never about hardware limitations. Limitations of imagination of the designers, maybe, but we've had action games for 35 years now.

Actions such as ‘press the trigger and your character will shoot a gun’ and ‘press the button and your character will swing their sword’ can now be easily expressed without going through a command system.

And yet we can't purge ourselves of the awfulness that is quick-time events. I don't buy the argument. It's an attempt to handwave away trends without discussing real causes and effect. If the suggestion here were true, other similar mechanics, such as QTEs, would have been dead a long time ago, not be a core element of a huge number of triple-A titles.