200MB/tab just to display some text with markdown and maybe some small images? Isn't that insane?

Answer is too simple. Exactly what is taking up what memory? I'd love to see the annotated memory map of these processes. M Kb of javascript text. N MB of image data, O MB of this, P MB of that.

Unpopular opinion time:

My guess is most developers don't care and are not even looking at this anymore, either during development or after release. Nobody seems to even know how much memory their program allocates and how quickly it allocates that memory under various running conditions. I used to challenge my fellow developers: Stop in the debugger right now. About how much memory should the process be using? Nobody even seems to have an order-of-magnitude guess anymore. It's your program, dude! Shouldn't you know this?

You can ask any embedded software engineer exactly how much memory his/her program uses, what's the stack size, what's the heap size, what's statically and dynamically allocated. Sadly, this discipline is pretty much gone outside of that specialized area.

For browsers, this problem is "once removed". Firefox and Chrome both go to heroic efforts to reduce memory usage. However, given the html and javascript which fill most websites, and users expecting responsiveness, it turns out to be very hard to use less memory.

Chrome: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/memo...

Firefox: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Memory