I'm not sure what you mean. We don't have a paid exporter tool and the memory used in Cocos Creator is quite low compared to other high-level game engines. If you have any issues, you can contact us at our forums or on our Discord.
Also exporting is not that hard compared to other engines, what were you exporting to?
I'll explain what lead me to believe this, because the Cocos website is vague.
Upon installing the Cocos dashboard I'm told "to compile native projects you'll need Visual Studio and C++ common tools". From what I know, Visual Studio (as opposed to Visual Studio Code) is what you use when compiling and packaging a program - which I don't like using because I've found it uses up way more of my computers resources and isn't as simple as hitting 'export' in any other game engine and having the engine do the work, which I believe is a common feature in game engines. So, I went to the Cocos site again and looked at the "Cocos Runtime" page, which has a 'contact us' option and no other useful information - this led me to believe that in order to have access to an easier in-engine compiler/exporter, I'd have to pay for it (I can't stress this enough, the website is very vague).
Regarding the resource usage of Cocos itself, I opened up the editor and checked my task manager. It was using from 2500-3000mb of RAM as opposed to 1500mb for Unity, 1300mb for Godot and around 400mb for engines like ct.js, NRG, Fusion 2.5 etc.
I really don't know what else to tell you, apart from this is what I've been led to believe based on what I've seen on the site and what I've experienced with the engine. I'm running on Windows 11 by the way.
Let me go with this step by step, We do need a C++ runtime for building to native. It should be installed automatically when you install the engine or already there when you installed VSC or other programming work. You can see how to export to native platforms here.
https://docs.cocos.com/creator/manual/en/editor/publish/native-options.html
Cocos Runtime is a different product for large app developers that allows you to add an HTML5-wrapper into your app so that you can add a gaming area to your app that improves the playability of these games. Mostly used for WeChat, Taobao, and other apps. This is an option for export in the engine, but currently not many options for western developers who do not want to bring games to China.
As of the memory usage, I'll check with the team on this and give them feedback. Thank you for your message, we take these issues seriously and work to improve the engine with every iteration.
