New PC game system requirements

Dumb question # 6,891,795,264,118. Are the new game system requirements all BS? I just bought Star Wars Battlefront, and I can play it, no problem, on my 10 year old MAC Pro (win 10) with an HD6770 1GB vram. This is way below the minimum system requirements of an HD7850 2GB or a GTX 660. I am running it on medium settings 1080p, but FOV slider at 100% and its silky smooth. I also have been playing Mad Max which is supposed to have similar spec hardware. No problems there either. I don't know if its some kind of AMD magic with the drivers, but it just seems like the hardware vendors and the game makers are doing this arbitrarily. These games are made for consoles, and we know how much of joke they are. So why the seemingly exorbitant PC requirements. I want to build a new system, mostly for gaming. Should I save some money and build with 5 year old hardware? Sorry for the rant.

you can pretty much build an 800$ pc and be fine.

Are you sure those were the minimum recommended specs and not the more recommended specs?

Either way, it's probably just what they tested in house, really you could still be up and running with a Geforce 8800 I believe it is

Also what's the budget for your new rig?

Looking to spend between 500 and 800.

Sometimes they are, though I think that's more to do with the plethora of slightly-better-than-last-years-model that we've had in CPUs and GPUs for the last zillion years. Less so GPUs.