True, Windows becomes more and more bloated as time goes on.
My Windows 2000 screenshot running Firefox with the forums open while consuming only 700MB of RAM is a proof of that.
There is no way you will run Firefox on modern websites with only 512MB of RAM
If you look at the screenshot you will see that running Firefox with the LTT forums consumes more than 700MB of RAM
8GB is enough for most games if your OS is completely debloated.
Right now i am on my Windows 2000 machine and 1GB of RAM is enough for those tasks (Modern versions of Windows are extremely bloated):
As matter of fact Steam will autoupdate to the newest version and stop working,
They also have a warning message:
Lucky for me i was prepared for it, patched the steam client to prevent it from happening and removed the EOS message:
The current version of DOSBOX already runs Win9x just fine.
I used that to install Windows 98 SE on my phone to play Half-Life and Age of Empires II on my phone.