I used to run KDE and GNOME on a computer with 256 MB RAM back around the year 2000. Athlon 1000 Sempron and a Duron 800 (one of these machines started out with 128 MB RAM). KDE 1.x, 2.x, GNOME 1.x, 2.x. I don't remember the very minor versions. I tried a myriad of Linux distributions, and FreeBSD as well. I settled for Debian. Back then, we (me, friends, family, etc.) thought these DE's were very bloated. I remember KDE 1.x very vividly because I had to compile it myself (or look online for binaries), and I digged the CDE theme. The first lightweight DE (if you discount fvwm) I used on Linux was XFce, but that was later on. I pretty much started with KDE, tried a bit of GNOME, went back to KDE (I came from Windows 9x). In the end, I learned to appreciate GNOME, and MacOSX or Mac OSX as I used to call it back then (proper name was Mac OS X, I suppose).

My point is what you are used to is your reference point. The underlying OS isn't super relevant. On Linux, every distribution gets on par with each other eventually. On FreeBSD I used OSS and something like winmodem is just crap hardware. Nowadays my homelab and desktop have 64 GB RAM, while my MBP (M1Pro) only has 16 GB RAM which is the same as its successor (MBP 2015 with 16 GB RAM). Do I use all of that? Not really, but the main culprit is browser(s) (which includes apps these days). Curious if you can play Steam games well on FreeBSD. FreeBSD has a couple of neat things (tho ZFS is now better on Linux). I've always preferred PF to IPT.