[wbercx]

I think it's important to appreciate that while RAM itself is cheap, the same is not always true for upgrading it. A lot of people these days use laptops where RAM is soldered on, and is not upgradeable after purchase. And they may not have had a choice if the machine was provided by the workplace.

Trying to keep RAM usage low doesn't hurt anyone.

What I personally care more about is CPU usage, because it affects the battery life of my laptops. Why is VS Code using 10-20% CPU when I have it open in the background? This behavior seems to come and go with each VS Code update, even without additional extensions installed.

[derrikcurran]

Those are great points.

Trying to keep RAM usage low doesn't hurt anyone.

It depends on the degree. It's one thing to be cognizant of RAM usage throughout development but it's another to trade time that could otherwise be spent on features, usability, security, or more impactful optimizations, like CPU.

The bulk of a modern app's footprint, RAM included, often comes from outside dependencies. Abstraction overhead. It's the norm to trade app performance for dev performance and I believe it's good for progress.

[ummonk]

Have you checked your extensions? I just opened VS Code with a moderate sized codebase (Flask), and then clicked out of it and watched the CPU usage go to 0% in task manager (it was ~2-3% when I had VS Code focused).