To program simple things, maybe not. But if you are trying to do something complex then having a severe memory limit adds one more area of complexity to the process.

If you can remove areas of complexity then you are doing three things: 1. allowing mediocre people to accomplish the same goals as used to take skilled programmers, largely by throwing hardware at the problem (this seems to be the source of your complaint) 2. letting skilled programmers accomplish the same task in less time (again by throwing hardware at the problem) 3. making even more complicated things possible for skilled programmers

I certainly see the value in your complaint about things like the Slack app using Electron to make the UI easy to build (at the cost of my hardware performance), but that is a business optimizing for costs, rather than trying to optimize more for quality. Please assign the blame where it belongs.

Concur. I've done some programming for a platform that gave me way less than 128k to work with, and it's not rocket science. In some ways it's a hell of a lot easier than, say, web development.

It just forces you to be aware of certain things that are tremendously wasteful of memory and cycles, but which don't matter on "modern" hardware.

And by "don't matter" I mean "do matter a whole bunch, but your particular contribution to the problem is likely to be small enough that it won't help much if you spend the time to do it right, so why bother"