do you think that the listed specs in the comment are truly accurate regarding the types of machines needed to properly display Material design elements, or just the author's way of indicating the the current state of technology?

The thing is, it doesn't really matter. You can't program your interface for quad-core processors and 16GB of RAM because if 50% of the userbase is using 1GB on an ARM processor then you either have to design two interfaces or cater to the lowest denominator.