After recent discussion on Zotero [1], and seeing others' mentio a lack of lighter weight citation management (Jabref, an alternative, occupies takes 1.3GB memory on my machine, Debian 12), I came across Tellico which does the job (maintaining a bibtex file). Combine with Firefox plugin BibItNow [2] as an alternative to the JabRef Firefox plugin function.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36465243
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bibitnow/
I'd blog this, but for now I don't blog, so a HN post it is.