> […] the purposes of memory accounting.

This is a crucial distinction and I agree when the problem is framed this way.

The original statement by another GP, however, was that fork(2) is wasteful (it is not).

In fact, I have mentioned it in a sister thread that the OS does not have a way to know of the kind of behaviour the parent or the child will exhibit after forking[0].

Generally speaking, this is in line with the foundational ethos of the UNIX philosophy where UNIX gives its users a wide array of tools tantamount to shotguns that shoot both forward and backward simultaneously and the responsibility for with the number of deaths and permanent maimings ultimately lies with its users. In comparison, memory management in operating systems that run mainframes is substantially more complex and sophisticated.

[0] In a separate thread, somebody else has mentioned a valid reverse scenario where the child idles by after forking and it is the parent that makes its data pages dirty causing the physical memory consumption to baloon.