On the one hand side people complain that Turbo Pascal and WordPerfect (or even UNIX for that matter) worked extremely fast on an 386SX with 4MB RAM and that modern software eats hundreds of megabytes of memory and seems slower, without providing much new functionality.

This attitude (replacing a lean and fast terminal, by one rendered using a web browser engine) is exactly why modern machines that are 1000x faster and with 1000x the memory still seem to be slow for basic tasks.

Of course, it's a free choice. You can waste resources by replacing small programs by browsers ;). But it's reasonable that many people find it a waste.