I agree that It is silly that an OS that is still basically NT 3.1 needs 8GB to run.
In early XP days, it was 32MB for the OS and 2GB for Firefox.
I suppose the answer to the riddle is that now every program included in Windows is an Electron abomination with its own "Firefox".
Soon, every "Firefox" will include its own slightly different LLM.
NOTEPAD.EXE will run at 2FPS on your 256GB AI box.