My i3wm environment doesn't randomly start anything I don't ask it to start and runs very comfortably with 8gb of ram heck it would run fine with 4gb and no swap. Maybe you are running the wrong os.
I run Linux and StumpWM on my desktop, and recently I had upgrade to 12GB of RAM, because it turns out 8GB is very easy to exhaust these days. I currently have 9.3GB tied up, mostly by browser processes.
But I don't run any Electron apps, so there's that.
But, yeah, I guess I wouldn't be able to run this same workload with 4GB RAM. That's what lubuntu is for.
OTOH, try starting a modern full blown distro on something like an rpi instead of raspian and you will quickly discover that you _NEED_ more than 4G of ram and a lot of CPU just to start firefox. Its even worse if you don't have hardware GL acceleration.
OTOH, the lightweight desktops (lxqt, lxdt, xfce) really are..
SolidWorks? CATIA? Matlab?
Should say that KRDC is a good RD connection manager, but it's KDE only unless you wanna install a third of it.
Premier or Final cut don't but DaVinci Resolve and Lightworks do.
Obviously if your workflow and thus your livelihood depends on a particular tool you should run a platform that runs it but I would question why someone with money would pick windows over mac.