[bsdice]

Arch, i3, RSS sizes, only counting processes from logged-in user:

2.6 GB ungoogled-chromium (Browser) 150 MB kitty (Terminal) 50 MB udiskie (Automounter) 46 MB picom (Compositor) 36 MB pulseaudio (Sound) 26 MB gpaste-daemon (Copy Paste) 21 MB polybar (Bar on top of screen) 20 MB dunst (Notifications) 17 MB i3 (WM itself)

Plus a bunch of services below that, which at this point is only noise. If palemoon works for you as a browser, that will only use 320 MB RSS empty on startup.

Machine has 64 GB RAM, no idea if Chromium by design would eat less on less beefier machines. At 4 GB RAM, zRAM is certainly an option, if you can't or don't want to upgrade. Without such tweaking, modern Linux desktops profit from 8 GB RAM. No matter what WM or DE you run. Once you start a web browser, game over. ;-)

[btdmaster]

Firefox may work a bit better when it comes to memory usage, especially because about:memory allows manual garbage collection calls if memory usage gets too high.