Some people run >32GB RAM with long uptime and there the chance of a random bit-flip might not be acceptable. Imagine working on some Deep Learning model, training it for 30 consecutive days and then hitting a memory bug during computation.

Not your everyday requirement, also ML is somewhat tolerant to small faults like that.

Depends. If a bit is flipped in a dataset you are likely fine, if in code your computation might crash. If you use enterprise-grade software like ZFS filesystem that keeps a lot in memory, it's much better to have ECC and accept a bit slower memory access for a bit better protection.

ZFS without ECC is pretty useless ...

ZFS is no more vulnerable to corruption when running without ECC than any other file system.

The developers of zfs suggest ECC because ECC is a worthwhile thing for those who care about their data.

You should stop spreading misinformation.

Rowhammer protection, for one thing.

ECC does not protect against Rowhammer attacks.

It seems you are correct, but surely it must make a practical attack much harder?

I'm not so sure. But it's not an area I know much about. But practically thinking: If you try to change the memory content of an area, that means you have software running on the target machine. Does it matter much then whether you need more time because of ECC?