People are less likely to be spinning up vms but may have far less ram to start with and the more apps they use that are wasteful of power and ram the more likely this becomes an issue for them.

It is truly strange to hear being resource constrained being described as a special case in computing.

Last time I taught undergrads (last semester) their computers were far from anything as good as we'd have. If I asked them to run anything remotely demanding, it really taxed their laptops.

We really do need to be more mindful of resource usage. I'd rather write my own lightweight clone of something I want than use an Electron-based hog. There are menubar-only apps that come with an entire Electron dependency.

Why is that strange for personal computer usage? How common do you think it is for users to experience a performance problem caused by low memory? I'm genuinely surprised that we could apparently have such opposing intuitions. My intuition is that it is exceedingly rare.

Your intuition is badly formed because it ignores how crappy real peoples computers are. The world is full of really bad computers that people don't upgrade because their computer is a low priority item for them and they have lots of other more important things to put their money towards like food shelter, and medicine.

Further their machines are full of software that runs all the time for no reason including but not limited to multiple redundant antivirus that are trying in vain to scan everything in real time in a vain attempt to prevent the next malware infection from taking hold.

Various services like file system indexing and virus scans run at inconvenient times and render things slower than before.

Laptops are super prevalent because their portability is more important than power. Its not at all unusual to keep using the same machine for 5-8 years as long as it still works.

Real people have bad computers with bad specs and in a massive number of cases the browser is already using a significant portion of the entire computers resources.