I've been using minio for local dev but that version is unmaintained now. However, I was put off by the minimum requirements for garage listed on the page -- does it really need a gig of RAM?

I always understood this requirement as "garage will run fine on hardware with 1GB RAM total" - meaning the 1GB includes the RAM used by the OS and other processes. I think that most current consumer hardware that is a, potential garage host, even on the low end, has at least 1GB total RAM.

The current latest Minio release that is working for us for local development is now almost a year old and soon enough we will have to upgrade. Curious what others have replaced it with that is as easy to set up and has a management UI.

I think that's part of the pitch here... swapping out Minio for Garage. Both scale a lot more than for just local development, but local dev certainly seems like a good use-case here.

It does not, at least not for a small local dev server. I believe RAM usage should be around 50-100MB, increasing if you have many requests with large objects.