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I'm mostly excited for the VRAM savings from apps and games which have loads of unused or super rarely used textures.

Game developers often aren't super careful with this stuff, and there could be literal gigabytes of data which isn't used at all.

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I worked on a PC/PS4/Xbox One game once. I wish I remembered more details, but at some point when looking at memory usage I found a 2048x2048 (or something like that) texture for something on a character. This texture was never anywhere near occupying the full screen. It got downsized once I told one of the artists, but I wouldn't be surprised if some games are inadvertently shipping with that kind of waste.

The release version of City Skylines 2 had enormous issues due to this problem. Some tiny details, like a pile of wood behind a shed, had ridiculous amount of pixels. I do believe that should be pretty much fixed in that title nowadays, however.

wasn't it rendering every pedestrian's teeth in detail as well? hilarious oversight

Are there any people out there doing this optimisation post-release for existing games ?

I don't know about that specific optimisation, but I remember Helldivers 2 did drop support for loading from HDDs, which allowed them to deduplicate assets bringing the game down from what I remember like 120GB to somewhere round 30GB.

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