That may be so. However, in that case, it does not make sense to complain about an application using x amount of RAM while not in use, which is the complaint that I was responding to ("it should not use 500MB of memory when it's [sitting in my tray] and not doing anything"). It might make sense to complain about Electron's overall RAM usage. As far as I can tell, that's what you're doing. I don't really have an opinion on that as I'm not familiar with Electron's internals. So on that point there's really nothing for us to argue about.
>Your idea of the idle state seems to be that the entire system is idle.
I'm talking about the state where the application is not being used, not where the entire system is idle. In that state it is easy for the OS to reclaim any RAM the app is using for use by other apps.