Do you honestly consider this normal? In the 00s I've used to run Windows XP (which was derided as an absolute pig -- what the hell did we know) + Delphi with a GUI designer in it much more advanced than anything we have now + 1-2 PDFs + a web browser with maybe 5-10 tabs + often a chat client in the background (usually QIP -- it supported not just one protocol like Slack, but about a dozen of them, and could send and show multimedia messages in addition to text).

Sometimes also a music player. All of this relatively comfortably fit in 128 MiB of RAM; it was really comfortable once I moved to 512 a few years later, and I thought that should be enough for the decades ahead.

But then we got electron and turning the web into an operating system on top of an operating system.

Now having a document processor barely fit within 8 GiB is considered acceptable...

Normal or not that's how it is. The incentives are not there and the network effects close the casket...

Is it regrettable? Idk. Definitely not unique to software though once you look and appliances, cars etc - they are not optimized for the things I prefer they would have been.