A lot of more budget devices still have 4 and 8 gigs. Not to mention all the older devices.
yeah, but thats not an development environment (at least not an acceptable one for anything serious)
Genuine question (I am not a developer): if you don’t use a bloated IDE, what do you need this much RAM for?
I have no idea what people are talking about. My M2 MacBook with 8 GB handles pretty much all programming I do on it (biggest thing I’ve worked on on it was probably a 500k line C++ project). And I do use CLion usually which is one of the big IDEs. I’d go for more disk space before more RAM honestly. (Sure, my main machine has 64 GB but that’s because I run huge compilation jobs testing distro packages, games, VMs, and a bunch of other stuff on it sometimes in parallel and especially the compilation jobs can easily take up 40 GB sometimes but I’d say that is not a usual use case.)