I think this is because many people had the N9, which had the same amount of RAM but managed to fluently multitask much better and without killing apps left and right (IIRC you had to try quite hard to make it kill an app due to memory exhaustion).

So people are asking why the Jolla can't manage as much with similar amount of resources, considering that the OS and apps themselves provide similar functionality to Harmattan and it's apps. Well, or quite often actually less functionality (Tweatian is for example still unfortunately nowhere near to what QNeptunia managed back then, no comparable event screen, no SIP calling,...). And of course Harmattan managed to do all that on a Maemo 5-6 based franken-OS with X handling the GUI!

So people kinda expect that a new distro with faster CPU and cutting edge components (newer kernel, systemd, Wayland!) should manage at least as much as Harmattan on the N9...

BTW, anyone can provide any insights how Harmattan managed to cope with the 1 GB of RAM ? I know it already used an early version of ZRAM and did some crazy things with OpenGL context reuse to reduce memory consumption, but would be interested to know if there was more stuff like this.