I had the freakish opposite experience where I went from an 8gb linux machine that was scraping the top of that to a 16gb machine at the same time I switched from openSUSE's standard release to their rolling release (Tumbleweed). My memory usage immediately dropped by 30-40% and the bits that didn't were all Electron-based. Even Waterfox with 4K tabs dropped significantly. I have no idea how they managed it, but it was a pleasant surprise at the same time it highlighted that if you use a lot of Electron apps there are no good options.