On MacOS (switched to 2021 MBP 14) basically identical setup is sitting on ~29GB.
I have no idea about Windows, but I don't think anyone would argue that there's much more room on Linux to adjust and optimize for lower RAM usage than on MacOS / Win
I often have to defend Linux because unknowing colleagues blame the OS, when htop shows it's this or that mandated background process.
The corporate security software is so awful mine stays at an ambient temperature of around 60°c with the constant background tasks. That can't be good for the hardware.
I laugh at discussions like this. Linux with a slim window manager and vim can run on just about anything and provide a productive programming environment for a codebase of virtually any size provided you can use a remote system for compiles and a slim browser like elinks to access online documentation.
That said my primary workstation runs separate VMs for every application for high security, so I appreciate my 64 cores and 256gb of memory these days.
Of course there were numerous ways to make a 2 GB machine starve if you wanted to or just don't think what is feasible or not and run several crazy Electron apps or worse. Some lightweight containers are not a problem, I have run those.
I remember phones from 20 years ago using something like 150 kB, admittedly they had no real operating system, just a simple task scheduler. Probably color display required a bit more already.