Sure, if you constrain “average user” to America. If you go to other places like India, where people don’t have $500 lying around to drop on the latest notebook, you’ll find a lot of repurposed laptops that have several-year-old specs still finding active use. Machines with 2 GB RAM and 250 GB spinning rust are not as uncommon as you might think.

And sure, if you just run one app and that’s it, you might get away with acceptable performance. But now try to install it over slow or metered Internet. Try to run it alongside Chrome/Discord/Eclipse/Spotify/Android Studio. Try to install all those apps without chewing up your disk space. These aren’t hypothetical scenarios, these are very real usability concerns.

> and apps taking even 1-2 GB of RAM isn't that big of a deal for the average user.

I live in France, a first world country, just checked Amazon, the N°1 best seller laptop currently has 4GB of RAM, a 64GB SSD, and a 1366x768 screen and a dual-core Intel Celeron CPU which does not even reach 3Ghz: https://www.amazon.fr/HP-14s-dq0000sf-Ultraportable-Microsof...

this is what the average user looks like (and will still look like in a few years, if people buy a laptop today it's generally to keep it 5 years). I have never ever ever seen anyone say "hey, my computer is fast" it's always "do you think you could look at it, it's super slow / it has viruses / ..."