Hmm, I can't get an RSS that small even with -nw (to use the client TUI), but leaving that aside, on my box just running GNU Emacs normally I get 88MB RSS, so maybe we just need to update the acronym. ;)
I think it's nuts that the Linux machine I run DaVinci Resolve on today has considerably more RAM than the Windows NT machine I used to use Premiere for editing on 22 years ago had hard disk space.
Back then mine was the "scary" machine in the workshop with its AMD Duron 700 and a whopping 512MB of RAM... and Emacs was just about usable on it!
It seems more nuanced. What does it mean that the command doesn't exist? Every serious Emacs user has their own personal bindings, some of those for their own custom commands. But "M-butterfly" suggests more rare hackery, though seemingly trivial for the hypothetical butterfly hacker: they have a "butterfly" key in their keyboard layout.
I switched from Vim. In Emacs, I can inline previews of LaTeX formulas in the same buffer as the one that I am editing. This is possible because Emacs has a GUI. Vim cannot do this because it runs in the terminal, and it also doesn’t seem possible to do this in gVim.
Meanwhile Emacs implements Vim’s modal editing through evil mode. So for this use case, Emacs seems to be strictly better than Vim.
(But to be fair even a minimal Emacs is about 20MB RSS these days).