You may want to look into how the xz backdoor has been discovered. That backdoor was very well hidden. Implementing a crypto mining malware would be blatantly obvious and yes, people do in fact look at such code
Oh yeah I remember netbeans from my school days. Was a quite nice one, but we more or less used it like a glorified texteditor with some buttons (except for the UI editor. Used that quite a lot).
i think it really depends on what you want to do, what languages you use and what text editor/ide you use. From my experience its usually not really worth it to get used to an IDE for bash. They all sucked. So instead I just have my emacs and my shell and I can start coding.
AS long AS you dont plan on selling your Ram I would still ask why you need so much RAM (if youre not running a lot if AI locally)