No, you can't. If you have an MBP, for example, RAM is soldered onto the mother board and cannot be upgraded. If you have a Thinkpad x220 or x230 like a lot of us do, you can only go up to 16GB because the BIOS doesn't support any more.
And regardless of which laptop you use, RAM is expensive in a lot of places. You can't expect everyone to throw hundreds of dollars at RAM just so they can run VS Code. Not to mention the "throw more hardware at it" attitude is the reason why we have bloated inefficient software in the first place.
yes, but I'd like to put my own stuff in RAM, not accidental RAM usage due to the technologies being chosen.
Intel's Cannon Lake is the only CPU that can use LPDDR4, but they are yet to solve their yield problems.
"unused memory is a waste"
Programs with a bigger working set tend to run slower, because of bottlenecks across the memory hierarchy.
That's incorrect. The vast, vast majority of developers around the entire world are running Windows and on a PC, not a Mac.
Regular users matter too.
> Windows actually keeps the most used applications in [inactive] memory for faster access time.
When an app uses extra memory, it prevents this from happening. If the extra memory use doesn't help the user, the net effect is a harmed user experience, even if they have enough memory to hold everything the currently running apps want to store.