I guess my language was a bit imprecise, by "software developers" I meant "people involved in the software development process" rather than the specific role of the person writing the code. I guess I should have said "software companies" or "companies developing software". Managers definitely deserve their share of the blame for demanding user-hostile bloat too, likely more blame than the developers.

On the developer end (as a developer myself) we definitely deserve some of the blame for embracing things like Electron with such zeal in my opinion. I don't care how much memory a developer's workstation has, there's still a lot of hardware in use that can't take the bloat. I'm not saying everything has to be a native app written in vi against an original print of The C Programming Language as Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie wrote it in 1978 or it's automatically shit, but something like React Native for the desktop would be far less horrible in terms of resource usage I reckon.

It could be that the customers most likely to pay are on more recent hardware. So why bother catering to everyone else if there is no return on investment.

Or for free software, chances are it is add supported. So push as many ads and trackers until the churn rate gets too high or competitors take market share.

Or more generally, maybe the design just follows the money.

Could also be reverse: why pay for software that won't run on your computer anyway?

Absolutely, that's a calculated decision that companies make. It is fully expected that a certain market segment is not interested in being a customer at a given price point. Market segmentation is often done by OS version or device hardware profile.