"were much, much more efficient with limited resources"

You are cherry picking which resources you care about. What about power consumption? What about heat? What about physical size? What about noise? I remember the fans in those old PC's, mine sounded like a jet taking off.

None of them are related to software or software bloat, or putting resources to good use.

This is a meme. Everything high quality happening on mobile is crazy resource constrained.

1-2 gb of ram is insane luxury compared to say, the Amiga which typically had 1000 times less - 512k or 1mb of main ram and the same amount of 'chip' ram (for video/audio processing).

I'm not a mobile device expert, but programmers don't have to think that much about 512k on an iphone, do they? On an Amiga it was often all you had for the entire system including the OS.

Yeah but the Amiga drove 640x256 at 16 colors (4 bits), so around 80kb. Contrast that with the newest iPhone which drives 640x1136 at 24-bit color, so around 2.08mb. This is 26x the number of pixels. Keep in mind you also have a networking stack and lots of semi-realtime sensor data.

Not to mention that the demands on the system in terms of features and performance are so much higher.

26x the number of pixels, but you have over 200 times the ram available and that's assuming your app only gets 100mb (and that AmigaOS takes up zero resources). The default Amiga had an 8 MHz, 16 bit processor which again is less than 100 times what's available now on an average device. I just can't see modern devices being construed to be nearly as resource restrained as personal computers from the 80s.

While it may in fact technically be a 'meme', I think a better word is 'myth'.

Well I consider my time a limited resource. In trade for my developer time I can use an extra 8MB of ram for a little html web game I am making I think it is okay.