There’s another reason why handles and the Resource Manager were so intertwined - because the 128k Mac was so limited and didn’t have paging support, resources

There’s another reason why handles and the Resource Manager were so intertwined - because the 128k Mac was so limited and didn’t have paging support, resources were fair game to be shifted around to compact memory, or even purged from memory to be reloaded when needed (with the right flag set for each resource.) I don’t think this would’ve been the design Apple would have gone with, if they had memory management when they were developing the Mac.