Has there ever been an investigation in how the average consumer app - email, browsers, word processing, etc - has changed over the years in terms of memory usage? I mean browsers are memory hungry (but that's because they use as much as is available, doesn't mean they reserve it from other applications), but a lot of modern-day apps are Electron ones, which easily cost a few hundred MB. Office has also moved from a set of native apps to heavier webapps.
OTOH, Apple is still all about native apps, mostly their own software packages, as well as an app store that up until recently didn't allow anything but native apps (not even sure about that). They also introduced memory compression, and IIRC Safari does some smart stuff with memory as well.