decent chunk of RAM maybe but my parents are happily browsing away on decade+ old chrome books. Ordinary web browsing you can do on a potato machine from 2008.

Even if you're a gamer performance on the desktop has eclipsed demand so much that you can play anything on a few years old machine. It used to be way worse in the "olden" days when only 10% of people had a system that was able to play Crysis.

Hasn't been true for about a decade. Modern browsers suspend most processor activity of background tabs, so it's mostly just memory pressure.

This could finally force the developers of cross-platform GUI and webview libraries, drunk on Moore’s Law, to sober up.