I’m concerned about in-system bloat because I read the linked article.

Rather, it’s more of an honesty bump. Components that make up the distro – the GNOME desktop and extensions, modern web browsers (and the sites we load in them) and the kinds of apps we use (and keep running) whilst multitasking are more demanding.

The desktop itself isn’t the only reason that you need more RAM, but it’s definitely one of them.