I don't need to be reminded of what stuff cost then: we've already established that my memory of that era is more accurate than you guys', plus I literally just reviewed a magazine of the era to refresh my memory and make sure I wasn't remembering wrong. (Link is still in my post.)
Computer magazines in that era liked to review just released (or soon to be released) high end systems. Occasionally they would feature low or mid range systems, but generally the focus was on cutting edge.
Nobody is saying resolutions higher than 640x480 weren't available in 1994. They certainly were. What we're saying, and this is the important bit you need to focus on, is that most home users still ran at 640x480, due mainly to cost. Memory was still expensive, so getting a video card and monitor capable of showing 800x600 or 1024x768 @ 16bpp and a refresh rate greater than (or equal to) 60Hz was still very expensive.
It wasn't until Windows 95, the rise in popularity of the Internet and the bottom falling out of the memory industry did screen resolutions start increasing on the average consumer's PC.
You might have a magazine from 1994, but I have actual hard data showing the most used screen resolutions from the early-80's to 2016. VGA resolution was king until 1995/96, when 800x600 started taking over.
Again, just because something was available in 1994, doesn't mean it was economically viable for everyone.
I mean, look at the timeframe. What was there that really required a resolution higher than VGA for the average PC user in 1994? It's not like you could run apps side by side in Windows 3.11. Webpages were just text and a few GIFs. QuickTime and Indigo videos were QVGA resolution due to the processor power required to decode the compression. Consumers weren't editing digital photos back then. Basically, you wrote documents in Word Perfect (or Wors), worked on spreadsheets in Lotus (or Excel), balanced your checkbook with QuickBooks and played games (a lot of which still used DOS for maximum performance and used VGA resolutions, at most).
So yes, in 1994 VGA *was* the highest resolution your average consumer used on a PC.