Does it really use all that memory or does it pre-allocate it and does its own memory management inside? Not that it’s better, but that would explain why it takes so much.
There is a lot of shared memory between renderers and the browser.
Your 208MB might not be additional, but a big subset of it could be shared with the renderer/gpu process.
If you want to know where the memory is going you can go to about://tracing and enable the memory-infra category.
At first I was going to blame all of the garbage from rockstar brogrammers, but even the simple HN comment page tab is using 264MB of RAM on macOS. The browser itself uses an additional 208MB according to Chrome's task manager, not counting all of the extensions. Where is it all going? There's 10 lines of JS on this page and a tiny amount of CSS. Has Chrome become that bloated?
This is especially annoying when many modern "desktops" apps are just Chromium wrappers that bleed memory.