I'm not saying there's no such thing as software bloat (there is) but the reason that your computer magically always seems to use 80-90% of the ram no matter how much ram you install is that the computer understands empty ram doesn't do anything but ram being used to cache files makes your user experience much faster

this is a good thing! if your computer stopped doing this everything would suddenly feel very sluggish and stuttery!

@0xabad1dea The RAM use thing is an older paradigm from when nobody had enough RAM to run the latest Windows OS smoothly, and applications had to free up memory constantly by pushing active memory to disks.

Conversely, the abundance of cheap RAM in more recent years has enabled certain software developers to become sloppy with their own housekeeping, and just never offload anything.