The last time I thought that was when I wanted to compare how much worse
Emacs fared when using it for working on LaTeX files compared to a
specialized simple text editor called Kile or something.
Emacs hit in at over 16MB with my current work session (granted,
containing quite more than just a LaTeX file).
Then I started Kile and it swallowed about 90MB of memory, mostly
because it pulled in half a dozen libraries and demons, getting those
KDE parts up that it needed for operation.
Don't underestimate specialized simple text editors.