You were speaking of explorer.exe's memory usage. That includes practically all the desktop experience. The right click menu, the desktop, the taskbar, the start menu, and more. Kill the process and see what all disappears. So no, you weren't speaking specifically about the file explorer, though it would take having some knowledge to understand that.
You don't have any idea of what it actually is or what its actually doing but you're 100% certain its overly large, complex, and wasteful.
Incredible.
And as mentioned, on my other Win11 machines I couldn't get explorer.exe to use more than ~200MB, with most of its usage around 110-130MB. I think you've got something else going on there, potentially lots of other 3rd party applications hooked into it causing excessive memory usage. Win11 doesn't inherently use 500MB of memory compared to Win10 only using a bit under 200MB. That's something with your machines.
> So no, you weren't speaking specifically about the file explorer, though it would take having some knowledge to understand that.
Don't blame me if the architecture stinks.
The fact is it's unnecessarily large, complex, and wasteful of resources isn't the consumers fault. Deciding to use a single monolithic block of whack code that uses all my memory instead of separating those functions wasn't my choice and I'm not gonna change my expectations to suit that weird decision.