That sounds perhaps too broad of a claim. Good engineering is to balance the needs of customers against the available time and cost of development, right? Scaling an app for low resource situations takes a lot of effort, often would result in a degraded experience and/or functionality, and plenty of apps don’t have any customer demand for such fallbacks, which is why plenty of good engineers and teams consciously choose not to spend their engineering budget this way. The Task Manager, being integrated into the OS and especially critical in low resource situations, has an incredibly strong argument here to work in low resource situations. Tons of user-space apps don’t make sense to scale at all, if memory is low or cpu is high from other apps, then it’s outside the bounds of the app to worry about. You would agree that not all engineering should be resilient to any and all conditions, and that it’s okay to design something that requires certain resources to be available from the start, wouldn’t you?

Only if this trade off is important enough to dedicate time to it. Good engineering is the balancing of trade offs, including the available amount of time.

A term lie craftsman engineering might be appropriate - someone who goes over and above the requirements because they can afford the time necessary to fulfill their personal aesthetic.