Unfortunately the attitude is pervasive and electron is also used for applications more in line with what your mom would be using. I think many would be shocked that a good chunk of their audience has less than 8GB:
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurveyIt's also a mistake to assume developers have plenty of RAM to waste. A couple of years ago I was using a potato for coding on the way to work that only had 2GB, which made atom a no go.
Also, what happened to the idea of dog-fooding? It's not dog-fooding if your on a machine much faster and with more memory than your users. I think the problem with windows 10 is that all the devs were dog-fooding on top of the line surface pros.
