What kind of stupid world is it where 8GB of RAM is actually not enough? I'm not doing anything that fundamentally different to what I was doing 10 years ago, and back then 2GB was fine on the low end of things.
Because ram is incredibly cheap and developer hours are incredibly expensive. I think it’s a bit silly too but there’s just no financial incentive for companies to care about memory usage when they know most consumer devices have tons of extra headroom.
It's like adding lanes to a highway, it doesn't reduce traffic, it increases demand. Developers will create software that needs more ram just cause they can. So unless you want to be running office 2010 then it's necessary.
Not gonna lie, writing code in various ways can be more efficient processing time wise, but often at the cost of complexity, or readability or time to code it.
As phones have gotten faster, and depending on what I'm working on, I'll often take the easier to code and read route than the absolutely best optimized route.
Although there are definitely times you still need to optimize
It's less about individual developers writing bad code and more about whole inefficient frameworks gaining popularity because of ease of use or deployment
I'd argue that's true in some cases, for example web apps might work well enough on modern device hardware but they'll never meet the performance of even mid-tier native apps