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.