I see your point, but I don't find the state of things incredibly surprising anymore. Consider how huge modern web pages have grown, with a ton of poorly compressible media attachments, an embedded programming language that keeps track of plenty of state, and dozens of external resources that pull their own media and have their own state. Not to mention that we're in the middle of a responsiveness space race between browser vendors, and doing less CPU work by keeping more things in memory is one of the basic performance optimizations. With that said, as developers we have obviously been spoiled by the embarrassment of riches in terms of available hardware resources and have also contributed to the problem.
