Is this even considered a bug by the Chromium team (i.e. is there any indication of plans to fix it, or is this just the image cache working as intended)?

It's a 10 year old project and memory usage has always been fairly high, I don't see any indication of a major focus on reducing it anytime soon.

I don't hate Electron apps or anything, but the ones I already have open are using up enough of my memory that there isn't much left to run more of them. I really do hope this improves in the future though. If not I may just have to buy more RAM.