Will the RAM crunch force a return to optimisation?

I think it's meaningless because the baseline RAM has changed. These days, the minimum is 8GB.

The reality is that once you use frameworks and standard libraries, there's a point where 'standardization' leads to generalization, which naturally moves away from optimization. 'General-purpose' means it's designed to absorb many situations, and that usually comes with performance trade-offs.

And people often forget that games have become far more complex compared to the past. These days, even a simple $1 game is much more complex than games from the Flash era.

As for AAA games, the tricky part is that the easiest thing for companies to leverage in marketing is 'graphics.' If a game's graphics fall short compared to others, consumer reception tends to be worse. Hardcore gamers usually care more about puzzle elements and game mechanics, but for casual gamers, graphics still rank very high.

In that sense, modern programming has become significantly more complex than it used to be. I agree that modern games need optimization, but we also shouldn't forget that games have grown larger and the scope of optimization techniques has broadened.