There was a change years ago to use RAM, as much as possible in apps to get speed. And for Chrome the decision to spin up more processes so when one fails it doesn't bring down all Chrome pages.

I've found Chrome to be fine here but speed varies greatly with addons. Most folk I know have no clue about addons. Your question has prior answers but maybe you wanted to debate design choices? I can't tell. With many choices in browsers, why not use what you like?