In my last job we had some memory issues with the build, many times I ended up running out of memory, trying to build the huge Java monolith that was the stupid "product" we made. Automagically, the issues were resolved to a decent extent when switching from GNOME to XFCE, in Ubuntu 24.04.

There is still some use for lightweight even in today. You make better use of your memory/resources in some application, than in something so fundamental.