I do too (my laptop is pretty beefy though), and yes you're right this would be a problem, if containers weren't built to combat this with Copy on Write filesystems.

That said, dependencies do take up a lot of space, but machines these days also come with a lot of space. People also run prune and develop caching strategies (ex. NPM) as a result. It's not like every container will be a GB in size, as it's not reasonable to have every container have that much content, but how many people are out there using 950MB dependency-filled base containers with 50MB of actual relevant application code? Most people learned the run-it-on-alpine lesson like 5+ years ago at this point.