I've been using openbox for over a decade. That's completely false. Xfce is not a memory hog. And it's not minimal either it's fully functional.
Gnome is a bloated mess of a thing and I hate it. Why would anyone want their desktop to use over 1gb of ram. I have a 32gb laptop and I still loath the idea of throwing away memory on such a bloated awful thing.
Running gnome on a phone. Yeah... No
weird, I'm running GNOME on my laptop right now and I checked and it's using 275mb of ram. I would not call that particularly bloated.
Phosh is not based on gnome-shell and nobody cares if you want to run openbox on your phone.
[dead]
It doesn't run GNOME Shell, which is the main memory hog of GNOME.
It uses some GNOME services, namely so it doesn't have to invent it's own. None of these services are memory heavy and all have a purpose (e.g. managing Bluetooth)