Texture resolution over time

I don't know if i could really make a discussion out of this, but I was wondering if anyone out there has a vague memory of what the most common texture sizes in video games were over their years of gaming? I'm mainly talking about environment textures, but take whatever liberties with the question you wish.

On top of that, I'd like to ask what the minimum tolerable texture sizes are for you as well, for the resolution you prefer to play games with. And does it matter if the game is top down, third person, or first person?

I remember developers were working with 32x32 textures on the N64 back in the 90s and early 2000s.

I'm not a fan of them going overkill and making massive texture sizes just because they can. Last thing you need is a huge 4k texture for some dirt on a wall in a fps where you are running around at 100+ fps and will never notice the difference between a 512x512 texture or 4096x4096 texture.

Some games may benefit from a high texture resolution like a game with lots of static gameplay where you are staring at an image or background a lot. But fps games, its just stupid to waste hard drive space on things you can't even see unless you are looking at side by side comparisons at maximum zoom in photoshop and counting pixels.

Its really bad these days, optimization has been completely ignored because they figure people have at least 4gb of vram on their gpus so why not just waste it all on massive textures. Really sucks when you find a dirt cheap game online to buy but its like a 60-80+ gb download for 6 hrs of gameplay. Its like, ya its cheap but 80 gbs is my entire monthly cap for my internet so thats not any good to me.

I remember when I was experimenting with modding with Half-Life they had texture sizes of 32x32, maybe 128x128 at times? This was 1999 or so.

It's always fun playing around with Grand Theft Auto's settings because it shows you how much of your video memory it uses: you mess around with like 90% of the settings and they might use a percent here, 10% there; but then you go and change "texture detail" from medium to high and suddenly you shoot well past your memory lol!