I'm on a 3080 and it uses 1 gb vram and 22% util. Sure it's still not lightweight, but certainly not as bad as you seem to be experiencing.

Perhaps it depends on other factors like screen resolution and scaling.

probably. I’ve got a 4K monitor with a 1050 Ti and the moment I open the site, GPU usage jumps from 1% to 99% and the fans go wild.

1.5-3GB is used to render your desktop on windows depending on resolution, think mine hits 3-3.5GB at 5k before even doing anything.