Just to double check... I loaded the same folder in Windows 10 IOT LTSC and Windows 11 Pro retail. Explorer.exe used ~500Mb peak working memory. In Windows 10 it was less than 200Mb. In windows 10 it also loaded about 2x faster, despite the system I'm using being objectively worse hardware in every single measurable way.
With Windows 11 you get less, and pay more.
Oh no, its going to use 1.8% more of my system's memory, what a nightmare, totally unusable.
Why is 200MB acceptable but peaking to 500MB just totally unacceptable and problematic? The original Macintosh had a graphical desktop with 128KB of RAM, shouldn't anything more than 50KB be unacceptable?
EDIT: Just checked on a couple of my Windows 11 machines, all of them have Explorer using <200MB of memory. So no, explorer.exe isn't necessarily using 500MB of memory. Something else is going on with that system.