It’s how big orgs like Google do it, sure. Working there I had 192gb of ram on my cloudtop.
That’s not exactly reducing the total spend on dev ram though - quite the opposite. It’s getting more ram than you can fit in a device available to the devs.
But you can’t have it both ways: you can’t bitch and moan about “always on internet connections” and simultaneously push for an always on internet connected IDE to do your builds.
I want to be able to work offline whenever I need to. That’s not possible if my resource starved terminal requires an Internet connection to run.