The State of Memory Leaks in GNU/Linux
Almost every computer program will - at some point in time - leak some memory due to bugs or because of unintentionally bad design. Some programs or systems (e.g. kernels) will be better at coping with leaks or recovering wrongly-allocated (or misallocated, 'orphaned') memory that cannot be safely/confidently redeemed. In my experience, over the past few decades at least, things are generally improving. GNU/Linux is good at managing memory and therefore it rarely requires reboots or additional RAM (which, let's face it, has increasingly become rather expensive... sometimes more expensive than a good CPU).
20 years ago memory leaks were a big problem and when coding a bunch of programs I too made some errors (in C), not only suffered from other people's errors. It is often an inherited problem for both developers and users. Sometimes the development tools themselves result in leaks.
The issue won't be solved by adding more memory; it's something that can be dealt with by using and sticking to better programs. Today, after 780 days of uptime on my laptop, it shows 1764.7 MB free, 1049.0 MB used with many open programs. The programs used are fairly light and even after more than 2 years there's plenty of spare RAM to "play with".
My understanding is, based on what Canonical tells everybody, Ubuntu became obscenely bloated for no good reason. The obsession with Rust won't solve this but exacerbate matters. Slop or sludge disguised as code won't just be awful; it'll be really hard to repair. █
Image source: The Railroad that Leads from Earth to Hell