So of course a pointy-haired boss found out about it and you end up with stupid stuff like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Upgrade_Service
But also the user you are quoting, the "gamedev trick" is actually somewhat of a true story as well. But it wasn't an optimization trick. It was just different teams that each acted as if they are working on the most important thing, competing for limited old-hardware resources! Some coders, pre-version control, would just pre-allocate ram even if they didn't really need it, just so they don't have to go through the dance of asking other teams to release some. As you can imagine, when the project ended up going beyond the hardware limits causing chaos and stress to the devs, those people would descend as heroes and say "Here I was able to free 512kb!" (from their unnecessary preallocation calls)
Ah, to be old on the internet... :)
Joke's on them, software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.