guess the parent is annoyed at spending 2-3GiB of ram on the VM itself.

even if the containers themselves only use 128MiB total: the VM will cordon off everything it's told to; which most people are unlikely to change until there's an issue, and is configurable down to 1GiB as a minimum.

FWIW Docker Desktop on my machine (M2 Macbook Air; 24GiB Ram) defaulted to using 8GiB of RAM.

They're also trivial to install without virtualization. Postgres has been one of the first things I install on a new laptop for over a decade now.

This is the right answer.

Scratching my head as to why devs are buying up these new macs knowing up front that they will not work well for the job they were bought for.

Why not make it easier for yourself and have your dev machine match up with prod?

Where I work, they used to give you desktop computers (pre Covid) for the workstation purpose, but post-covid they just provision a VM for you. Honestly, its probably cheaper in short-term and only mildly more expensive long term. No real IT work needed (since <cloud provider> handles the hardware), and automatic upgrades if more ram/GPU/etc is needed. Even a really big VM ($80/m) wouldn’t be crazy compared to the logistics of managing/storing/powering/networking a bunch of desktops across an office.

This is what I wonder. A powerful local laptop is so useful - instant feedback; works on the train or any other offline/low-connectivity setting; the only engineer you need looking after it really is the one who has it.

Having said that, cloud development means you don't need big capex orders for laptops all the time, and it's probably easier to secure.