Why are Adobe apps so dirty on MacOS?

A normal user will not find them “useful” just by looking at them. But they are useful for running certain features of the Creative Cloud apps. Adobe has defined Creative Cloud as a set of cloud-based services that they have rebuilt their apps to depend on, and which, whether or not you realize it, you are probably using every day. They handle things like loading (from the web) templates and suggested tutorials you see on the Home screen, loading library items from Creative Cloud Libraries, synchronizing the local Creative Cloud Files folder to the cloud version of that folder, keeping the list of fonts you are using from Adobe Fonts synchronized with your account and your other devices, controlling communication between Photoshop and any Creative Cloud servers that are doing cloud-based processing (like for some of the AI features), a bunch of other things, and of course, checking that the license is valid.

I’m not saying those are all great things, but that is how they designed their system. As to whether it is impacting Mac performance, maybe or maybe not. If you look at the entire Activity Monitor list, there are many, many processes “using” a total amount of memory that probably exceeds what you have installed. How is that possible?

It’s possible because only the busy active foreground apps actually use live memory. For any applications that are not completely busy, their memory use may not be currently active. macOS may stash their memory contents as inactive memory (subject to purging for other applications), compressed memory, or swapped to virtual memory on storage, to prioritize live memory for the busiest foreground apps.

In Activity Monitor, Memory Pressure tells you whether there is a real memory problem. As long as Memory Pressure is green, it doesn’t matter what the numbers are, the total memory system is handling it, there are not too many immediate demands on memory. So if you are trying to get some real work done and so an application needs more memory, macOS will rearrange memory usage (assigning less busy lower priority processes to inactive/compressed/swap memory) to give the busy application more memory, and as long as Memory Pressure remains green, there is absolutely no reason to worry about the memory numbers of any application, no matter how many applications are running.

When Memory Pressure spends a lot of time being orange or red, then it is true that the Mac does not have enough memory for the memory demands being made at that time.