I am engaging with the arguments you are making; I don't think you are engaging with mine. Reread my previous comment. Application designers do not get the luxury of somehow having high memory usage in an idle state but being able to cut down memory usage in an active state. Your idea of the idle state seems to be that the entire system is idle. You are not considering what happens where there is load. The app designer does not decide when the application has the leeway to have high idle memory usage ("oh, Electron idle memory usage of 500MB is fine because swap so it's basically free").

> Free RAM is just RAM that’s doing nothing useful. Better to fill it with cached application states until you run out.

So you recognize that you are only cruising when there is plenty of free RAM. You're setting aside this magical scenario of the idle state, but really you are just being optimistic that users won't suddenly act and overload the system. You are excusing significant waste by saying it won't matter most of the time. Perhaps that's true with certain definitions (i.e. many people on most days don't make their computer thrash), but in practice people notice when they have a problem, and I want to minimize such problems. I am not saying we can do any of this perfectly, but I think there is legitimate room for improvement that you are ignoring. I think it's reasonable to say that, with modest engineering effort, we could make every (say) 800MB Electron app into a 600MB Electron app. If you were running three at once before, now you can run four with a comparable level of performance. I think that's a genuine improvement that isn't some gotcha to you or an unrealistic fantasy.