Traces and memory are text. A gigabyte of text is an insane amount. That is an equivalent of tens of millions of lines of code, or hundreds of millions of AI tokens.
This kind of immediate-mode rendering is quite standard for TUIs. Although immediate-mode rendering tends to be significantly simpler and use less memory than retained-mode rendering, at the cost of some redundant computation. So I am not sure if this is the reason for the bloat.
It’s possible that it doesn’t play well with JS garbage collection, since it recreates the whole UI structure for every frame (which tends to not to be an issue in the languages immediate-mode is usually employed).
But yes it’s a bit more akin to game renderings than web rendering. Which can be totally fine if done well.
I haven't tried to make a TUI admittedly, but double buffering is the oldest technique on the planet. A TUI doesn't even need to pay the cost of a lot of pixels since its effective resolution is much lower
How on earth are you spending more than 50us on a UI like this from start to finish? What the actual hell? 11ms to construct a scenegraph of this complexity? I don't even know what to say to that.
If I saw our UI show up in the profiler eating 5ms of CPU time every frame, I'd send whoever was responsible to QA hell until they find some way to redeem themselves. Not even fancy animated 3D UIs, like what you get in Death Stranding, eat up these kinds of resources. Not even remotely close.