With DDR5 RAM prices skyrocketing, some mid-range laptops could soon ship with budget-level specs. TrendForce expects companies like Dell and Lenovo to stock more notebooks with 8GB of memory. These reasonably priced options may no longer handle intense office and gaming tasks.
ZRAM is real. Even on computers with lots of ram it lets the os compress and tuck away memory that a process is hoarding. When I start using android studio all these long-running election process get 1/2 their memory swapped out to disk, and evidently they never really needed it because days later I still see lots of their memory swapped out.