Problem is one of mentality, imho. See eg. the countless HN posts "hey look! I've used X to do Y" showing off some cool concept. The proper thing would be to

Problem is one of mentality, imho. See eg. the countless HN posts "hey look! I've used X to do Y" showing off some cool concept. The proper thing would be to take it as that: a concept. Play with it, mod it, test varieties. Like it? Then take the essential functionality, and implement in resource-efficient manner using appropriate programming language(s). And take a looong, hard look at "is this necessary?" before forcing it onto everyone's PCs/mobile devices. But what happens in practice? Proof-of-concept gets modded, extended, integrated as-is into other projects, resource frugality be damned. GHz cpus & gobs of RAM crunch trough it anyway, right? And before you know it, Y built on top of X is a staple building brick that 1001 other projects sit on top of. Rinse & repeat. A factor 20 is 'nothing'. And certainly not the issue here. Just look what was already possible (and done!) when 300 MHz cpus were state-of-the-art. Wirth's law very much applies.