This shouldn't happen, can you please file a bug with more more information about your environment and specific usage?
I run kind in the minimum docker for mac spec which is one core / 1gb and it performs just fine. We've worked hard to make it lightweight, including a KEP upstream for slimming down the binaries.
Are you sure you are talking about Kind and not minikube for instance? for me Kind is the most efficient way of running a real cluster on my machine, a bare cluster merely takes 600MB for RAM in my case and the creation takes too long only in the first time because it downloads the docker images.