> It's the peak usage that matters, not the average. Wasteful software limits the amount of things that can be done on a computer simultaneously. So it's not "we shouldn't care about our software's resource use because users don't do multiple things at a time". It's "users don't do multiple things at a time because they can't, because we don't care about resource utilization".

Sure, but how many applications are you running? Let's say you have 20 applications running at 200MB each that's 4GB (50%) of your available memory with an extra 4GB for spiky workloads (if you have 16GB it drops to 25% available memory usage).

We're comparing vim (and other editors) with tools created 25 years later. The available resources back then and now are drastically different. The joke of emacs meaning "Eight Mb And Constantly Swapping" is because most computers back then only had 8MB of memory. In terms of memory consumption emacs utilized 100% back in the day compared to the 2.5% of VSCode today but people don't shit on emacs.

I don't want to come off as someone dismissing vim (and other editors). I personally use vim/tmux on a daily basis but I'm also fond of using IDEs like VSCode/IntelliJ/etc. There is a huge portion of the internet that thinks that these new editors are shitty because of their memory consumption when it is not really a good argument in 2021.