I'm not necessarily convinced by the posted argument. That being said, I tend to think that people running a bunch of VMs and Electron apps and Docker cause them to use a bunch more RAM than I would consider to be "reasonable", and they've lost sight of how much you can do in a lesser amount of memory. (Typing this from a computer with 8 GB of RAM, which I have repeatedly been told is "below adequate" for development.)
The problem is, by now development practices in many companies effectively force using multiple large containers. I know an x stack could use 4x less memory if I spent considerable time on ripping out unnecessary cruft, but few people in the company would agree that it's time well spent, and the home office allowance suffices for a machine with 32-64Gb RAM (especially in 2020, when I don't really see that much value in laptops for dev work anymore).
