You would be surprised but that is exactly what you do when you access VMs on clouds.

To be short: if you can make your app less greedy - do it.

In some cultures we have a concept of "engineering conscience" (ru: "инженерная совесть"). Are we loosing all that?

Oh sure, not just VM, but in all rented server instances. But we’re talking about home machines here.

Don't give them any ideas.