Perhaps in the hypothetical scenario that I had the hardware I wouldn't care. But I don't have the hardware, and I do care. Separately, I'd think you'd want to

Perhaps in the hypothetical scenario that I had the hardware I wouldn't care. But I don't have the hardware, and I do care. Separately, I'd think you'd want to weigh the memory usage against the utility of the features it enables. The memory is there so that it can be used, of course, but I have a certain memory budget, and I'd rather use that budget on things I care about. So now I can weigh this 1 GiB overhead of Gnome compared to something lightweight against the extra facilities the Gnome provides. I can't think of anything I miss in the lightweight option compared to Gnome, so I'll stick with my lightweight choices.