It seems like Electron is decently optimizable for a lowish memory footprint. Both the Element and Discord desktop client run with consistently ~50MB RAM each.
You _are_ measuring the total RAM usage, right? Something like `free -m` right before starting the application, and then after it warms up?
Every time I see these "electron is not heavy, it only uses X MBs of RAM", it turns out that the author looked at a single electron process (out of typically 5-10), and then only measured RSS, completely ignoring shared memory.
But that aside, yeah Discord is pretty heavy. My current instance which is only connected to a single server is eating 555 MB PSS, or 846MB RSS. Definitely not a lightweight at all.