> We live in the 2020s now and ram is plenty. The small computers we all carry in our pockets (phones) usually have between 4 and 16g GB ram.

I do not think the monster CPUs running Android or iOS nowadays are representative of embedded CPUs.

RAM still requires power to retain its contents. In devices that sleep most of the time, decreasing the amount of RAM can be the easiest way to increase battery life.

I would also think many of the small computers inside my phone have less memory. For example, there probably is at least one CPU inside the phone module, a CPU doing write leveling running inside flash memory modules, a CPU managing the battery, a CPU in the fingerprint reader, etc.

That's entirely the point. In the days of user devices with 32MB of RAM, embedded devices were expected to make do with 32KB. Now we have desktops with 32GB and the embedded devices have to make do with 32MB. But you don't get to use GB of RAM now just because embedded devices might have that in some years time, and unless something is done to address it, the increase in hardware over time doesn't get you within the budget either because the software bloat increases just as fast.

And the progress has kind of stalled:

https://aiimpacts.org/trends-in-dram-price-per-gigabyte/

We've been stuck at ~$10/GB for a decade. There are plenty of devices for which $10 is a significant fraction of the BOM and they're not going to use a GB of RAM if they can get away with less. And if the hardware price isn't giving you a free ride anymore, not only do you have to stop the software from getting even bigger, if you want it to fit in those devices you actually need it to get smaller.

I recently looked up 2x48GB RAM kits and they are around 300€ and more for the overclockable ones. That is 3€ per GB and this is in the more expensive segment in the market since anyone who isn't overclocking their RAM is fine using four slots.

The end of that chart is in 2020 and in the interim the DRAM makers have been thumped for price fixing again, causing a non-trivial short-term reduction in price. But if this is the "real" price then it has declined from ~$10/GB in 2012 to, let's say, $1/GB now, a factor of 10 in twelve years. By way of comparison, between 1995 and 2005 (ten years, not twelve) it fell by a factor of something like 700.

You can say the free lunch is still there, but it's gone from a buffet to a stick of celery.