Have you reported it? There appeared to be a leak in corespotlightd in 10.15.0; I reported it, and I never ran into it again in 10.15.2.
FWIW, I've had TV running in the background for days, and it's at 227 MB. That's not a very useful measure, though.
You can't extrapolate from high memory use that there's a leak, just like you can't extrapolate from low use that there isn't. The question is whether there is continuous growth somewhere.
I don't use Home Sharing; maybe there is indeed a leak somewhere in the Home Sharing code.
You keep not really answering the question: has your memory pressure graph gone yellow or red?
Sounds great, but that's really not a realistic view. Software has grown more complex. It's hardly a Mac-specific issue. My first Mac OS X machine came with 128 MB RAM. My first Mac with 12 MB. My first computer with 64 KB. There's absolutely ways to make software more "efficient", but everything is a tradeoff. I definitely don't want Apple to go back to writing more code in assembly again, or to revert to a more manual memory management approach; the risk of bugs and security flaws is too great. Thus, more inefficiency.
Yes, yes, everything used to be better.
This is like the people who argued that their jailbroken iPhone 3G supported video recording; therefore, Apple was screwing non-jailbreak 3G people by not building the feature in and requiring an update to the 3GS. Yes, you could technically do so, but no, the camera wasn't great.
I don't know how well Al Dente works. If it's well enough, um, why not just install that, then? Apple has clearly decided that the experience isn't good enough.
My guess is newer Macs have a better battery management controller, and so they've designed the feature around that.
