Not sure where you're getting your numbers, but as a quick test I cloned an Electron Hello World app[0], bumped its Electron dependency to the latest version on npm, and ran it. It came in at around 90MB resident on the main process, with a GPU process of about 70MB, a "zygote" process of around 60MB, and a separate nodejs process around 35MB. Even if some memory was shared between those, that's still quite a bit more than 40MB.

[0] https://github.com/greggman/electron-hello-world