I'm a C++ programmer working in games and I run out of 64GB of ram in my workstation daily. I can't wait until we finally get all upgraded to 128 or 256GB of ram as standard.
Well, thats why we consumer have to buy better hardware and more ram? As an old former Amiga programmer I have always till this day been a less is more kind of guy. Make code run faster and make the program use less ram.
Good in theory unless you need all of the data at once. There are things we do now that wouldn't have been possible (in the same sense) 25 years ago without a lot of work. We might use languages that are 200x slower, but they might be 10x more productive. That's a winning tradeoff for many people.
Nope, it has nothing to do with what you as a customer get as a final product. Loading the main map of the game uses about 30GB of ram in the editor + starting the main servers in a custom configuration will use that amount again. Systems like fastbuild can use several gigabytes when compiling. None of this has anything to do with the client, which will run with as little as 4GB of ram.