Sure but they had much lower resources all around. Why cripple a high-performance CPU by not having RAM?
I think you significantly overestimate how much they can reduce latency for SSDs. Keep in mind, even a 80286 from 1982 had a memory latency in the 200ns range[1].
[1]: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2004/10/6401-latency-lags-ban... (view PDF, table 1)
Just put a huge swap file on it.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Improving_performance#zram_...