"RAM is not really something you explicitly ration."
It most certainly is. My old pc ran on 8MB of ram. Modern ones need 16GB for a comfortable experience. They do not do much more than I needed back then. I think it's reasonable to expect a simple chat app to not take up 128 times as much memory as my entire PC had when I was young.
I don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation at all. That’s like saying “oh well we landed on the moon with a turd burger of a computer so that means I shouldn’t need more than 8kb of memory!”
Okay but I’m not trying to land on the moon, I’m trying to have an HD group video call and maybe play Cyberpunk in 4K later.
Let me ask you, how much did that 8MB of RAM cost you back in the day? I bet it was more than the $100 it costs to get 32GB of RAM or the $200 it costs to get 64GB. Before you apply inflation!
it sent text messages, and received them. Ok now I can send some pictures and audio clips. I would understand a 10x increase, but not literal gigabytes.
I have more memory so i can do more things, not so I can do the same things only slightly slower than I could before.
It most certainly is. My old pc ran on 8MB of ram. Modern ones need 16GB for a comfortable experience. They do not do much more than I needed back then. I think it's reasonable to expect a simple chat app to not take up 128 times as much memory as my entire PC had when I was young.