he cannot think of an instance where technology hardware prices reverted to levels from decades before.

Not as large an increase, but as we've mentioned before, the 2011 Thailand floods flooded a substantial portion of the world's hard drive production capacity, which had been concentrated in an area that was hit, and hard drive prices roughly doubled for about two years.

Thailand is the world's second-largest producer of hard disk drives, supplying approximately 25 percent of the world's production.[76] Many of the factories that made hard disk drives were flooded, including Western Digital's, leading some industry analysts to predict future worldwide shortages of hard disk drives.

As a result, most hard disk drive prices almost doubled globally, which took approximately two years to recover.

You have to either have a massive reduction in supply (as with the Thai floods in 2011) or a massive increase in demand (as with AI memory users today). It's not common for something large enough to swing the needle that much.