Top-ish utilities should just be preconfigured to only show RSS unless you absolutely need to know what's virt. A lot of griping would diminish.
There are many specialized allocation patterns -- especially for larger system things like DBs, virtual machine / runtimes etc. -- that will mmap large regions and then only actually use part of it. Many angry fingers get pointed often without justification.
I think the griping occurs when things actually slow down, or system perceived available memory cripples resources. Maybe they point the finger to the wrong place due to misreading virtual, but I doubt people are getting angry when their system is running smoothly.
And this attitude "oh memory usage problems are a misreading of top" promotes poor memory management hygiene - and I think there's a strong argument that's all good in server applications / controlled environments but for desktop environments this attitude causes all sorts of knock on effects.
There are many specialized allocation patterns -- especially for larger system things like DBs, virtual machine / runtimes etc. -- that will mmap large regions and then only actually use part of it. Many angry fingers get pointed often without justification.