My early professional daily driver Linux workstations had 32-64MB of memory.

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.

1 GB would require some serious optimization if you want to do some work. But I have a 2 GB machine running Xubuntu without modifications and it is quite usable for some development work (It was bought as a school laptop years ago. You could not use it in school anymore because their stuff requires 4 GB nowadays, but I sometimes still use it just for fun.) I don't think switching from Xfce to sway saves you a whole GB.

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.

My first Linux machine ran on 8MB RAM. Ok, could be that some modern software would not run well on such a thing any more and a modern web browser is unthinkable.

When I studied computer science the VAX-750 had 4 MB and 15 students could compile at the same time from each their terminal. Swapping got a bit annoying under those conditions, but in the evening when a couple of them had gone home it started to run smoothly.

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.