The same can be said about just about any software (plus again, AS is an exception, a typical IDE doesn't use anywhere near that much RAM - only few hundred MB to low GBs). Everything is bigger these days - web browsers show bigger web pages, photo editing software deals with much larger photos, etc. Today's cars and planes are also much more complex than the cars and planes from 100 years ago.

What it comes down to is, are the extra features provided by today's tools worth it? For most people, that's a no brainer.

As a random example, take auto import suggestions.

I can start typing 3 or 4 letters, and get a suggestion for a function name to call (and it's not just prefix search either, it is aware of words, etc.), then I just hit enter, and the function call is added to my code, plus the import statement is seamlessly added to the top of the file. I can see that function's documentation right then and there, navigate to its implementation and its usages inside a 3rd party library or just in my project, I get an immediate warning if I use it wrong or make a common mistake, etc.

Then you have languages like TypeScript that automatically narrow variable types based on the checks you perform around them. So if you have `if (user === undefined) { return }`, then it knows that below that block, `user` is definitely not `undefined` and the error reporting and autocomplete reflects that and doesn't complain. If you later remove that check, you'll immediately see red squiggly lines on code below it that broke because it can no longer rely on that assumption.

All of this requires having the code of my project and all of its dependencies indexed into a pretty verbose structure, but the productivity and reliability gains are 100% worth the extra bit of RAM and CPU time it takes - that's what it's there for.