The age component is absolutely a reason and so is the leverage of the community and friends like you said. No doubt about it. It’s herd mentality and FOMO. Finally it is also how easy to get in and stay sucked in. These other platforms have the dopamine trigger game figured out on their apps. Fediverse doesn’t have that so much, other than the organic “did someone reply to me?” feeling. If you don’t engage then fediverse is not pulling you in.
Three years ago bought the same mobo, same cpu, 16gb corsair, 256 gb Samsung ssd, gtx 3080 Ti, plus everything else to build it and the cost was $1200. You got a deal.
To be honest that 550 mobo sucked until 2023, when they finally released firmware that allowed for us to set the language. For some weird reason the mobo defaulted into Chinese and was impossible to make changes to it. Lived with a non configured mobo for a while ¯\_(ツ)_/¯