> “You silly kids and your 16GB of RAM! Back in my day, we got by with 32KB!”
Did I say everything should run in 32KB of RAM? I did not. Perhaps now you can be serious instead of sarcastically and tendentiously avoiding the topic of discussion?
It's reasonable for a text editor to use far more than 32KB of RAM, but it's not reasonable for one to not run well on a system with 8GB of RAM (unless the user is editing some massive files).
> The reality is that software is increasingly more complex...
That's true, but also vastly overstated as an excuse for laziness and lack of care.
> ...and even simple tasks require more and more resources as the cruft builds up.
Now you're getting somewhere. There's no good excuse for most modern programs requiring so many resources.
The reason is software engineers are actually terrible at their jobs, and the profession (and its backers) embrace a lot of terrible ideas and excuses. Among other things, the end result is programs that (seemingly more often than not) expand to waste the resources available until performance drops to the minimum acceptable.
The alternative isn’t always “people just need to be better at their job”. Sometimes the alternative is that the thing you like to use never gets built at all because the cost of building it “right” would be prohibitively expensive. It’s always a balance.
The reality is that software is increasingly more complex and even simple tasks require more and more resources as the cruft builds up.