Well the author seems to want text logs instead, which seems much much worse for this.
I recently delivered a production-ready embedded system running Armbian with 512megs RAM, and indeed disabled systemd-journald for our uses, also .. but even with it enabled, our Lua-based app was (science/data analysis on sensor network) running in the best environment it has ever run, so I can confirm: 512MB is enough for a lot of things.
“What did the Romans ever do for us?
… All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health”
Replace “Romans” with “Increased RAM usage”.
Sure you could strip away a lot of that functionality, even at the distribution level (by for example not using an init system at all, instead just one shell script to initialize things), but then you'd end up with an operating system that's not general purpose for today's standards anymore.
it did have virtual Memory and swap
Windows 95 also didn't do things the modern way. It didn't keep an image of every application's windows in RAM. It kept track of what covered up what, and then asked applications to redraw themselves when needed.
Another huge amount is going to features like internationalization. Unicode is a beast that takes a good amount of code to implement, and Arial Unicode is a ~20 MB TTF file.
Modern luxuries like being able to tweet in Japanese are quite expensive.
You can run quite a lot in 512MB of RAM if you use the right languages to write code in. I was surprised about how little RAM my moderately complex daemon written in Rust uses, for example; I expected to have to allocate a gigabyte of RAM to the VM running it (based on what other tools similar to what I was doing needed) but the entire system turned out to be quite comfortable with just a quarter of that. I didn't even try to optimise for memory usage, which is what made this so surprising. I stil had to give it some more RAM because unattended upgrades tended to get stuck, but I learned a lesson that day.
Ever since I've been meaning to try to mess with Firecracker + bare bones daemons to run virtual machines services with absolutely minimal overhead. I like the virtualisation boundaries from a security standpoint much more than container boundaries and now I wonder how much I can shrink my overhead by.