This is definitely not true for the client-side software under discussion. Millions of devices requiring more resources and energy. The problem is that’s an externality to the developer.
My MacBook Pro M1 16" seems to be averaging about 13 watts of power, about the same as previous i7. My house idles at around 200 watts (lots of smart devices, etc). Hardly worth obsessing over it.
Irrelevant because Spotify doesn't pay for, nor do they have to care about user's resources.
If a user doesn't have enough ram to use Spotify, Spotify doesn't care. That user canceling their service is lost in the normal user churn. Spotify most likely has no idea and doesn't care if resource wastage affects their customers. It isn't an immediate first-order impact on their bottom line so it doesn't matter
This is antithetical to capitalism's founding principles. Resources (profit potential) will always increase unbounded forever. That's the only way the scam works
IDEs I think are a bit of a special case. Under the hood, it's constantly re-compiling and re-analyzing everything. That truly does take up a lot of memory and CPU. Probably not as much as if it were super aggressively optimized, sure, but still very heavy.
Full featured IDEs like this have always been heavy, as far as I know. It's only the pure-text editors without advanced full code analysis that can get away with low resources.
Ok, fair enough with IDE, but for instance I was using web storm ide for years and sometimes struggled with memory issues. But when I switched for cursor, I forgot about this at all