A New Tiny Basic for the 6502

FTA: “Tiny Basics are not known for their speed. They do not tokenise the input like MS and newer Basics so there is a lot of string compares going on for every line of code executed.”

Even ignoring the increased speed, wouldn’t any increase in code size soon be gained back because storing programs takes less room?

I can only see this make sense if you want to store your basic in ROM, and have very little space there, but is that a realistic use case? Wasn’t RAM historically more expensive than ROM?