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When I was car shopping last year, this was very much not the case, due to the supply chain issues. We ended up buying new and waiting several months, despite preferring something a bit older and less expensive, because used cars cost about the same as new ones. Some used cars cost more than used ones last summer, because there wasn't a waiting list.
The situation may have started to clear up by now, though.
This is true precisely because of my point: used cars today are about as good as new cars. This was simply not true twenty years ago, or even ten years ago. There used to be some really shitty cars on the market. Growing up the used cars were stuff like the Neon, the Cavalier, the first gen Ford Exploder, the Jeep Cherokee. Of course, being middle aged now, I'm growing nostalgic for some of those cars, but they were real junk in a lot of ways. Used to be that bottom end old cars got to 60 in "eventually;" had self changing oil by 80k, were junk or Ships of Theseus by 150k, were pigs on gas if they were larger than a Focus, were loud and uncomfortable and ugly. As a result they lost value quickly as better, faster, prettier cars came on the market. Sports cars went through such a revolution between 1995 and 2012 or so that every five years cars were noticeably faster and better handling.
Today that simply isn't the case. Even mom-mobiles are generally fast enough that the limitation is the driver's willingness to press down on the gas moreso than the car's capability to hit higher speeds. Most of the creature comforts like heated seats, ABS, bluetooth audio, GPS, rearview cameras were standard equipment on mid-high end models by 2015 so it's not something you need to go new for. Car design was in a much better place 2010-2015 than it was 1980-2005, so used cars look better than they used to, and improved paint prevents that sun-faded look old trucks used to get. ((Maybe I'm just crotchety, but I also think that car design has gone into decline in the last couple years as companies compete to be more EXTREME on the one end, more aggressive and less friendly all around, and all the SUVs start to look like fish.))
Either this is just an amusing typo, or there's some lore here I may have forgotten.
Also, to your point, it's fascinating that cars today have bigger power numbers and bigger fuel economy numbers than cars of the 90's or even the 2010's. The Buick Regal GS(?) had a turbo-4 engine good for like 270 HP (at least, as advertised) and even that is kind of hum-drum now. A compact SUV from today probably has just as much torque as a V8-powered F-150 from the 90's.
I think even 2000's cars have started to get that weird paint crust from age that I used to associate with beat-up 90's cars. Time will tell how cars from the past decade hold up in another 10 years.
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