I upgraded my system less than 24 months ago, up from 8gb to 16gb of RAM. My main reason for that was gaming, but I also expected a speed-up on the usual OS tasks.
A month ago I realized that my RAM was topping at 95% capacity when running the usual suspects (vscode, edge, etc). I bought an additional 16Gb, and I'm already at 55%.
Now, RAM optimizations aside, what the hell...
I blame us, or the current generation of us. Performance (CPU and RAM) is so cheap that I feel we don't optimize anything anymore. Many of my colleagues don't have a clue on how to run a profiler, let alone actually optimize a system.
And we are always turning to more productive yet less performant platforms such as nodejs etc. It's a valuable trade off, but maybe we have gone all to an extreme...