I'm going to upvote this comment because not everyone in the world can afford $300 for 64GB+ of RAM. The solution to not dump everything into RAM is a great one.
Fortunately, I've had a fancy Silicon Valley job for 15+ years which now lets me afford many GBs of RAM if I wanted to but it was a different story in my 20s. I relied on free or almost free hardware to learn. And that free hardware usually lagged in specs.
Yeah I agree with you not everyone can afford it, but lots of young people build $1800 gaming PCs. If you want a powerful Linux workstation desktop PC for fun projects like this you can get a Dell t5610 with two 8 core xeons and 128GB of ram on eBay for $650, then add your own $100 SSD.
I would not recommend running out and buying a new current gen Ryzen board+cpu or core i7-whatever and 128GB of new ram at ddr4-4200 prices.
Fortunately, I've had a fancy Silicon Valley job for 15+ years which now lets me afford many GBs of RAM if I wanted to but it was a different story in my 20s. I relied on free or almost free hardware to learn. And that free hardware usually lagged in specs.