This is Not A Good Thing. This is people throwing every last feature -- even if it has a pile of 800kb of DLLs/SOs attached -- into every app, with no regard for memory.
I find my system thrashing almost daily at this point. I need to upgrade. Two years ago, running predominantly the same software, 4Gb was just barely not enough, and I upgraded to 8Gb. And two years before that, cut the memory requirements in half again. And again, and again, until you get back to the 1Mb of RAM I had in 1990.
There has been a trend to do exactly what you say you want for 30+ years. And you know, some of that extra memory has been used to great effect -- we can do a ton more now than we could in 1990. But a lot of it is wasted, just Because It's Easy.
And that wasted RAM means pointless upgrades every two years; 99% of the bloat at this point is for something I don't need or want. The ONLY valid reasons to need 16Gb+ are if you're actually using that much data in one place -- a server that needs to scale, for instance, or editing video, or maybe a game that uses crazy amounts of data and/or video.
That the same apps are bloating 2x every two years -- and as a result get slower, since hard drive and memory speeds certainly aren't doubling every two years -- is really unacceptable laziness on the parts of companies and developers in general. It's pretty much the opposite of a Good Thing.