Millennial here. I’ve been consuming Reddit, and now Lemmy, almost exclusively on my phone and for me it’s card view all the way. Often the graphic content is more important than the title and opening posts only to find out it’s not funny or interesting feels like a waste of time. Only when I find a post interesting enough that I want to comment or see the comments, I open it. Instances or communities that I don’t like go on the blocklist.
If I really need to use Reddit, I open old Reddit in the browser with an extension that turns it into a mobile friendly site with card view. The new design has always felt sluggish and bloated to me, but not because of the card view.
Some features/plugins can be quite taxing on the system and in extreme cases it can slow the editor down to the point of being unusable. I’m a happy Neovim user with a LazyVim setup, but I experience this extreme slowdown for some JSON files and I haven’t looked into it yet to see what causes it.
You can let your editor do the same compute intensive or memory hogging things that a GUI editor does. The fact that it runs in your terminal doesn’t make it lightweight by definition.