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Welcome to the "NodeWebkit" world. Where wanting to open a file bigger than 2MB is considered "unreasonable" and an app taking 200MB of RAM to show a few small files is normal.

There are two sides of this coin.

0) As programs are expected to do more or run faster, they are required to use more computational power and memory. As examples, this is especially true of 3D Rendering or Video Editing software.

1) Because of the price and abundance of hardware - many programmers have stopped caring about nearly all optimization unless it brings their program to a halt. Requiring more computational power and memory to run many of these programs.

To many people $50-$60 for 8GB of 2x4GB DDR3 RAM isn't a lot of money. It's about as much as a date to the movies and cheaper than going out to dinner with the family.

Many people use laptops as their primary workstation these days.