I don't buy that. Because you can attach bots? or make calls, custom emoji? (you can do all of these on MSN) and more (like theme customisations and font changes!)
> How do you know the RAM usage of gchat?
You can see each tab's memory usage with Safari on MacOS as it's tied into the Activity Monitor.
Google Cloud Console uses 989MB for me, for instance.
And to add on to that - these features shouldn't have any noticeable resource consumption of the kind people are complaining about. Bots shouldn't affect performance at all. The ability to make calls should have no performance impact when a call is not being made. People aren't complaining about Slack with a call being slow - they're complaining about Slack taking a long time to start up, and Slack using lots of memory and CPU just sitting there doing nothing.
That's not necessarily a good proxy. Safari, like Chrome and Firefox over-allocate far more than they need speculatively for caching & rendering purposes. There was a whole blog post on HN that completely bungled memory metrics when looking at the integrated Activity Monitor https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26179817