The complaint can be applied to any modern software, unfortunately.

You're right, though I'm not sure about all modern software quite to that extent. VS does have a reputation for being bloated. Even startup is not super fast IMO.

I checked just now. A recent Delphi with a project open: 175-200MB. Water (our IDE, I work at RemObjects) about 300MB.

Sure, and the performance improvements across VS 2026 releases prove that it could be much better.