yeah as said, normally people would see records/data classes as classes that don't use the same amount of memory than a normal class. i.e. some kind of immutable struct. that's why I'm a little bit salty about the feature.
currently records are more comparable to the scala case classes, where you have automatic destructors, better equality, immutability, etc... and not necessary a compacter memory data.
reading the proposal makes more sense than this deep dive, since it explains the reasoning why they don't added special cased data classes.
Being able to compare memory to compare two object doesn't make an object any lighter, compared to magically calling a compare method on the object itself (can be decided at compilation time, thus no performance penalty: it depends on what the compare method does.)
Immutability also doesn't make the object lighter, it's again a compile-time property.
I am still missing something...