If companies needed to pay ressource usage of their apps, the digital world would look nothing like today
For software companies it’s the same, in a way. They pay whatever the consumers deem appropriate. It’s just that consumers don’t really care for the most part, so the cost is basically $0. RAM is cheap, and if a company prioritizes shipping features over optimizing RAM, that’s almost always going to be the deciding factor.
My time isn't
Regardless, we’re talking about the average user. As the article implies, on average, users’ time is in fact cheap compared to the alternative, or maybe the time cost is simply insignificant.
Additional 100k cost per year vs time, energy and hardware for billions of users?
Have you checked RAM prices this week?
It's zero, because most people cannot just not use WhatsApp, M$ Teams, etc. because WhatsApp has a monopoly on their centralized garden.
It's not like a Matrix where I can easily switch clients like I can switch refrigerators.
Even if someone would be able to provide an alternative, Facebook would just "kill" them like Apple did kill Beepers iMessage alternative.