I repeat, "the level of destructibility" first, and second compare system requirements for windows XP vs 11. Subtract 4 gigs of ram from the game to find what the game itself needs. Windows 11 uses more than 2 orders of magnitude more ram on its own than XP. Running mspaint on 11 will have minimum requirements of 4 gigs or ram. You're not comparing apples with apples.

How much is loaded at once? How big are areas? How much is being prefetched? Those matter. If you're comparing a contiguous open world with dense actors to Red Faction ps2 levels (and likely simultaneously complaining about graphics not advancing enough while demanding higher resolutions and exponentially increasing the requirements in the process)