The target market is enterprise. If I showed up for my first day of work and they handed me a 2019 MacBook Air I'd be pretty unhappy.
I really don't get this attitude of indignation when a powerful machine's resources are fully utilized. What else are you doing with with that computing power? There's not some finite pool of computing power we are depleting here, they are figuring out how to make more all the time!
It's your right as a consumer to have a pro-consumption attitude, because you're spending your own money. Be thrifty. Be profligate. You choose.
But having it as a developer is a different matter. That "powerful machine's resources" aren't yours. They belong to your customer, and it isn't your business what your customer is doing with the computing power your program isn't using.
Writing programs that demand more resources than necessary forces people to discard and replace otherwise perfectly good computers. Which, again, you as the developer don't have to pay for.
If tragedies of the commons don't bug you, then none of this matters. But if they do, then imagine millions of people ordering millions of cardboard boxes from Amazon containing millions of sticks of DRAM to run that O(n^4) loop that you're about to check in.
I can sympathize with this attitude with things like a Slack clients, which are designed to run in the background, and which developers probably don’t have much choice over.
But there are plenty of lightweight IDE options. IntelliJ competes to be the most powerful IDE available. That implies using lots of compute resources for productivity gains that might be marginal or not even realized by all devs.
The 2019 Air is underpowered (1.6 GHz Dual-Core, 7W TDP[1]) even when comparing it to more affordable hardware from 2019 or secondary market business laptops from the prior 5 years or so.
The problem isn't that people are hogging all the CPU, the problem is that it's hard to get computers to people around the world, connect them to infrastructure (power, internet), and train people to use them. Plenty of smart people have actively tried to solve this problem and have failed. I'm not sure if adopting such a principle means anything whatsoever in the face of what appears to be a larger challenge than providing computing power to a willing yet deprived population.
I really don't get this attitude of indignation when a powerful machine's resources are fully utilized. What else are you doing with with that computing power? There's not some finite pool of computing power we are depleting here, they are figuring out how to make more all the time!