How is that not better? If you could do it without consuming gigabytes back in the day, and now you can't, something must have gotten worse. The cost of consuming gigabytes has gone down, but being able to tolerate a worse situation doesn't mean the situation isn't worse.
You couldn't consume gigabytes because that amount of ram didn't exist. You still had apps with the same issues that would eat all your ram.
Computers crashed all the fucking time for dumb bugs. I remember being shocked when I upgraded to XP and could go a full day without a BSOD. Then I upgraded to intel OSX and was shocked that a system could run without ever crashing.
Edit: this isn't to say that these issues today are acceptable, just that broken software is nothing new.
> You couldn't consume gigabytes because that amount of ram didn't exist.
No, they didn't consume gigabytes because they were written is such a way that they didn't need to. Run one of those programs on a modern computer with gigabytes of ram and it still won't. It was as easy then as ever to write software that demanded more resources than available; the scarcity at the time was just the reason programmers cared enough to fix their bugs.
> You still had apps with the same issues that would eat all your ram.
The worst offenders back then had objectively smaller issues than what would be considered good now.
> Computers crashed all the fucking time for dumb bugs. I remember being shocked when I upgraded to XP and could go a full day without a BSOD.
Because XP could handle more faults, not because the programs running on XP were better written.