Mostly Electron. I don't like it either, but Electron is a fact of life now.

While you don't have to join in on that as a developer, you still have to be aware that 95% of users will have no idea that their instant messaging application uses 800mb of RAM to idle, or whether that's a bad thing.

Do you only ever run a single process in some non-multitasking OS?

The rest of us are using Linux, Windows and MacOS, where many processes run side by side, each with memory requirements.

Indeed, my first versions of Linux were running on 512 MB PC and my 8GB laptop from 2009 does just fine.

I run regressions on half a million data points. My 2017 Macbook Pro with (checks) 8 Gb of RAM works fine. I'm not sure what all you guys' mothers are doing.

Half a million data points sounds like a lot but it's smaller than a 1k texture. RAM for integrated graphics is VRAM too, just to render to the screen you need a ton of it, for every open window.

Not op, but my main laptop is a 2013 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM. It’s old enough to have developed dead pixels, the backlight is now noticeably uneven, the USB ports have become loose, several keys now only work unreliability, and it now does an emergency low power shutdown when the battery reports 55%.

(Naturally this means it is now permanently plugged into mains power and an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse).

Yet the RAM is still sufficient for my use of macOS, dozens of Chrome and Safari tabs, Xcode, TextWrangler, iTunes, etc.

Your use is probably shaped by the limit, though. I mean, a few tabs open in Chrome is easily a couple of GBs alone.

A few dozen tabs, as in often in the range of 24-60.

That one aspect never even seems problematic or limiting, and it’s not like I’m oblivious to all the other things wrong with such an old piece of hardware.