Well I was being perhaps a bit deliberately controversial
> for no reason—besides perhaps making it more convenient for programmers
That's a massive and excellent reason to make a system consume more resources. In fact I think it's probably the main reason programs do! If new feature X can be done in 1 man-week and consume Y resources, it's entirely possible that it can be done in such a way that it consumes just 1/4 of those resources. That might take 10 man-weeks (and/or much better devs). So you don't, because users generally aren't willing to pay for that. Basically only a few very niche products do this (game engines, embedded, ...). Basically, the economics of adding feature X was such that if it can't use a huge amount of resources, the buyer can't afford it. So it uses a lot of resources, becaue the buyer wanted the feature.
> I believe that the problem is that programmers are doing things for themselves, and not users—which is eventually who will use the product. Electron is a great example.
This is partyly true. Electron (and similar) is an excellent example of the economics above. I also can't believe how someone can write a chat client that uses 1Gb of ram in any universe. But the economics were such that JS developers, unfortunately were easy to come by, and a browser engine with DOM (of all things) was the best way to get a cross platform UI running with these developers. So the arrival of Slack was really just like any other feature. Someone wanted a cross platform shiny group chat application, and they wanted it now and not in 10 years, and they wanted it to cost reasonably little. The answer to that, unfortunately, was "ok but it'll cost you two cpu cores and a gig of ram".
Was it just for the developers? well, partly. But indirectly it's for the users who weren't going to PAY for C++ devs to write slick and lean native versions of this software
Bottom line: every user has a limited amount of money and a limited amount of computer resources. When given a choice, my experience is that users are much more willing to pay with more resources and less money, than vice versa. The important thing to remember is that the two are connected - a program that takes less resources is more expensive.
