If I full-screen it in high enough resolution it can be excused for using 100MB temporarily.

The window in the article wasn't very big. At most it would have about 10MB of framebuffer, and the images on display would fit into 1MB uncompressed.

We can't excuse typical program waste with screen sizes. Especially when you can switch to 1080p or 720p and watch them still use massive amounts of memory.