In general, you're correct - RAM does literally nothing if it's not being used. Several reasons why this principle doesn't apply in this specific (Electron) si

In general, you're correct - RAM does literally nothing if it's not being used. Several reasons why this principle doesn't apply in this specific (Electron) situation: (1) Every single Electron/webtech application I've used hasn't just consumed tons of RAM, but also had a noticeable CPU (-> battery & performance) impact. (2) Most webtech apps I've seen have had memory consumption in the 200-400 MB range - which isn't a problem on my 16 GB desktop, but is a problem on my 4 GB RAM laptop. People have less RAM than you think, and want to run more applications than just yours. Which is better: to be able to run Spotify, Discord, Slack, Matrix, Obsidian, your web browser and a video game all at once, or to have to manually open and close applications when you OOM? That is - wasting 200 MB of RAM isn't bad if your available RAM is far in excess of 200 MB. For most people, it isn't. If Electron apps each used only 5 MB more than necessary, you would see virtually no complaints at all. (3) Inefficiency is making bad use of available resources. Not only are chat applications like Slack and Discord not intrinsically difficult problems, but the very existence of third-party clients like Ripcord[1] show that these applications are making extremely poor use of the resources given. [1] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/