ReactOS Runs on a Pentium II with 64 MB of RAM

I saw this post and asked myself this:

Why can't modern Linux even run graphical installers on 384 MB of RAM? See: https://x.com/_vkaku/status/1721347077169696804?s=46

I tried installing Bookworm 12.2 / i686 and the installer ran in low memory mode. See full requirements here: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch02s05.en.html

What has caused Linux memory usage to go up so much in the last decade? A decade back I could run Puppy Linux in RAM so well.