I will point out it’s not just Windows at fault here (though it’s not guilt free). Modern consumer commercial software, across the board, is bloated shit. Even a lot of the prosumer or even full professional software is the same.

The modern web is pretty bloated too, pretend to be average Joe chrome user without adblock and open 15 tabs of the most popular sites on the internet. It does not matter what OS you’re on, that’s going to be a frankly ridiculous amount of memory usage.

This was not ideal but kinda manageable about a year or two ago before memory prices went crazy. Memory was almost commodity unless you were an enthusiast, you could just get more if you needed it and it didn’t really cost you much.

The ecosystem wasn’t really set up to expect it to get more expensive at all, let alone multiplied by several times