Two reasons: One is because of software bloat. Apps and frameworks keep getting larger, so they need more memory. But that's only a small portion of the explan

Two reasons: One is because of software bloat. Apps and frameworks keep getting larger, so they need more memory. But that's only a small portion of the explanation, and when talking about 16GB+ of RAM, probably almost irrelevant. The other is because RAM is there to be used, particularly for caching. The problem here, however, is that every app is its own island in how it does caching, so multiple apps consuming RAM for caching will end up doing the wrong thing. See https://jmmv.dev/2021/08/using-all-memory-as-a-cache.html https://jmmv.dev/2021/08/using-all-memory-as-a-cache.html for a detailed description of this issue.