Given that efficiency one of Linux's most touted advantages, what in the world is Ubuntu's PR department thinking? Ubuntu isn't providing any more functionality than when its memory requirement was 4GB. What is hogging all that extra ram?
The same as any other corporate PR department: "At least now when people run it with N GB of RAM, we can just point to the system requirements and say 'This is what we support' rather than end up in a back-and-forth"
If you expect them to have any sort of long-term outlook on "Lets be careful with how developers view our organization", I think you're about a decade too late for Canonical.
At home I have a desktop running Arch plus Gnome with 32GB RAM and I am at 7GB on a normal day and below 16GB at all times unless I run an LLM.
Mainstream users and business organizations don’t really understand that concept and would prefer to see how the operating system enables their use cases and workflows.
RAM shortages will be quite temporary. Making predictions based on individual component shortages has never been a winning strategy in the history of the industry. Next you’ll tell me that graphics cards will be impossible to get because of blockchain.