The "<resource> is cheap" mantra also really only makes sense if you are writing server code, where you yourself pay for all the memory your code will ever use. If you deploy code to a large number of users it makes little sense. If a million users start your app daily, and your app has a 5 second load time and uses 300mb of ram, you are wasting over 50 days of user time, and hogging close to 300 terabytes of ram.
So you are telling me that I can easily exchange development time which I would have to pay for end-user resources, which I would not have to pay? Sounds like a great deal.
Then I hope we would also tax the bad UX of the competing 20-year old Frankenstein applications, which lead to slower business processes (= more resources used as well).
Your last sentence hits the nail - many users don't have a choice in selecting the application, and due to industry fads can't expect to have a better option.
I can make a great chat system that uses fast native client, but it won't change the fact that Corporation A paid for a slack license and won't switch to mine.
People also takes it a bit to far. Sure, RAM is cheap enough, but if your application requires 64GB of memory you may start having other issues.
We have customers who requires servers with 64GB+ memory, of single applications. This is running on VMs in VMWare. If a ESXi host crashes, you'd want VMWare to migrate your VM to another ESXi host, but that becomes somewhat tricky if you need to locate one with 64GB of available memory. Unless of cause you're way over-provisioned, which is actually pretty expensive. More realistically VMWare will start moving a ton of VMs around to put all those with little memory usage on other hosts, in an attempt to find 64GB for your VM. This takes time.
It can be difficult to explain to people that really this should look at their memory consumption, if nothing else to plan for fail-over.
Waste the company does not have to pay for is not waste as far as they are concerned. Customers rarely notice that kind of waste either, or at least not enough to do anything about it.
But, I am traiding my time for my user's CPU and RAM, and evidence suggests many users are willing to pay the CPU and RAM to get more apps with more features.
