iTerm2 eats 150mb+. Any cocoa app use that much of memory. App Store is 500mb just after launch.
What gives you that idea? Lots of apps have cruft, but that's nothing to do with Cocoa.
A "Hello, world!" in Cocoa uses around 13 MB, and the application bundle weighs in at 79 kB. The fact that Electron uses a bare minimum of over 100 MB just to get an application running is a source of some understandable consternation.
People have skewed ideas of what's doable in memory constraints in 2019 for the feature sets that customers tend to expect.
Compare a "media-heavy" slack with that Telegram, or compare with Telegram minimum.
To support that, you'd need far more than a "Hello World" stack.