Well, until you open a browser... or five, because these days nobody wants to build native applications anymore and instead they shove webapps into electron containers.

Right now, my laptop doesn't have to run much. Just a combination of KDE, browser, emails, music player, a couple of messengers and some background services. In total, that uses about 9.5 GB of RAM. 20 years ago we would have run the same workload with less than 1 GB.

Two possible and opposite interpretations of your comment:

1. Modern Linux feels exactly as responsive or worse on modern hardware than old Linux used to feel on old hardware.
2. Linux feels much more responsive and fast on modern hardware than it does on old hardware, unlinke other OSes.