Also people forget that the jump from 8 bit to 16 bit doubled address size, and 16 to 32 did it again, and 32 to 64, again. But each time the percentage of "active memory" that was used by addresses dropped.
And I feel the operating systems have gotten better at paging out large portions of these stupid electron apps, but that may just be wishful thinking.
Memory addresses were never 8 bits. Some early hobbyist machines might have had only 256 bytes of RAM present, but the address space was always larger.
Yeah, the 8bit machines I used had 16bit address space. For example from my vague/limited Z80 memories most of the 8bit registers were paired - so if you wanted a 16bit address, you used the pair. To lazy to look it up, but with the Z80 I seem to remember about 7 8bit registers and that allowed 3 pairs that could handle a 16bit value.
This got me thinking, and I went digging even further into historic mainframes. These rarely used eight-bit bytes, so calculating memory size on them is a little funny. But all had more than 256 bytes.
Whirlwind I (1951): 2048 16-bit words, so 4k bytes. This was the first digital computer to use core memory (and the first to operate on more than one bit at a time).
EDVAC (designed in 1944): 1024 44 bit-words, so about 5.6k.
ENIAC (designed in 1943): No memory at all, at least not like we think of it.
So there you go. All but the earliest digital computer used an address space greater than eight bits wide. I'm sure there are some micro controllers and similar that have only eight bit address spaces, but general purpose machines seem to have started at 12-bits and gone up from there.
And I feel the operating systems have gotten better at paging out large portions of these stupid electron apps, but that may just be wishful thinking.