I think they understood their OS and memory model better than most commenters in this thread do. I was once paid to read most of Windows Internals 5 and try to understand their memory management concepts, some of which date back to VMS, and most of them actually make a lot of sense.
The Background mode has its merits too, but I guess they never imagined that a background process would need to spend huge amounts of memory just to do some background work.
I wouldn't really count the 32 bit version, but either way windows 10 has the exact same requirements as windows 7. Actually 7 was higher by a gigabyte if you wanted XP mode! So if you agree this would have been a bad limit in 2020, then that suggests it also would have been a bad limit in 2010.
Sure, most of time im very happy with Win2003. Pretty solid OS. There are some
issues, too bad never resolved, like PageFile management and Cache management for example. I bet there are more...
The Background mode has its merits too, but I guess they never imagined that a background process would need to spend huge amounts of memory just to do some background work.