300 MB is 1.25% of my RAM. An application using 1.25% of my RAM seems reasonable.
When so many little tools that you normally keep running in the background, it starts adding up. Not to mention that not everyone has that much RAM. Until recently, Apple still shipped Macbooks with 8GB RAM.
I've also started having issues with my Windows partition filling up with these applications. Again, no one application is a problem, it's the trend that's the problem.
No single raindrop is responsible for the flood.
And we're talking about memory usage here. Nothing is stuttering from not enough memory if they're only using 12.5%.
But who has 10 applications all showing animations at the same time? Or constantly animating at all? If a button animates when you click it, or a message animates when it pops up, it's not exactly slowing down my system.
This non-concern for resource usage and good software design is why energy costs are sky rocketing today.
Okay, bad analogy. My point is: just because your budget is high and you've got bytes to burn doesn't mean all those bytes should be burned.
It is NOT true for desktops which run different applications all the time, the user often switches between them, and where uncommitted memory is automatically used by the kernel as disk cache space.