Agreed. It's an uphill optimization battle. We're now in a world where you need 6GB RAM to chat on Discord while scrolling Facebook.

Ubuntu and its apps (particularly Firefox) are incredibly efficient and respects your hardware resources. I can write a web page with a 5MB RAM footprint. It's when you open the New York Times that your swapfile gets face-slapped.

Funnily enough, an Ubuntu server will run on a half-eaten potato. I've got 16GB in mine, and I'm running servers for LAMP (Nextcloud and Wordpress), NTP, Samba, Mail, Jellyfin, tor, XMPP, CUPS and a few other things. It typically uses around 2GB at idle.