They'll develop with 8GB of memory in mind, but under the assumption that they are the only app running. And if it's Chrome that's probably right most of the time.

As a former React developer, I can't help but look back at the monsters we created. We spent a decade optimizing developer experience, only to outsource the hardware costs to the user’s RAM.

2013 - my 8GB [0] MPB was enough to run docker on my MPB, not light-speed but smooth-working-speed. Every website was blazing fast though.

2026 - Same budy runs VSCode and Sketchup (big project) offline as day 1. I played Factorio last year. Hacker News and Wikipedia works great, google and GitHub are ok. But 95% of the internet is not decently usable: Gmail, WhatsApp, Messenger, local gumtree - that one crash without an Ad-bloquer.

We've reached a point where a machine capable of 3D modeling can't even render a chat interface.

In all honesty, developers know better. I am not writing web everywhere for recreational purposes, but economical. There is not incentive to not externalise the cost.

That's fair, everyone's optimize for their own incentives.

I don't think knowledge is involved here. Hardware tax just isn’t directly paid by the people making the decisions so it it's not seen as a constraint. In other word: "don't care".