Exactly. The issue today is that even if you optimize your OS and DE to be very memory efficient, it matters very little as soon as you open a modern web browser. And without a modern web browser a big part of the online experience is broken.

Running apps is what RAM should be used for, not wasted on the base system.

Unused RAM is wasted. But used RAM is also wasted, sometimes. If I can accomplish the same thing with less RAM, that's better, because it lets me do other things at the same time. It doesn't mean I'm not going to use that RAM, that would be pointless. My desktop running dwm typically idles at ~50GiB RAM usage from random crap I've got running. But I can prove that the desktop is using no more than like 300MiB.