Bus already pointed out about actually having the chance to use the RAM.
In regards to cost - I would be confident they chose what was optimal, you can’t compare this to retail PC market, these are specific b2b deals, they could have literally gotten the 32GB chips significantly cheaper than 16GB.
What I’m not confident is battery usage, 32 giggies will use twice the power (which isn’t a lot but it is all the time, you don’t really turn off RAM) of the exact chip in 16 giggler flavour.
CPU bottlenecking isn’t really RAM related. And I wouldn’t say nowdays 5 year old CPUs are outdated (like a 5yo chip 10 or 15 years ago). I would use my phone much as my PC, so an old CPU but plenty of RAM sounds about what I want.
Also it’s Linux, not some bloated megacorp OS, so it’s a bit better, tho apps remain much the same (eg browsers & web pages).
Oh, I’m not disagreeing with it being weird, my main point was to switch the weirdness towards battery use as nothing else matters.
And CPU doesn’t bottleneck RAM usage.
As for use case (which again, I’m not disagreeing as my main point is “it wouldn’t affect you in any way other than battery” + “they prob went with the cheapest option that still works, just like they did with CPU”), prob apps being fully in RAM and not swap, not closing old apps, etc. So like FF & 3 chat/social media apps (they all have inefficiently big libraries), a few store and service apps (for car/taxi/food delivery/etc), none need to leave RAM. Idk how to get to 32, but perhaps over 16.
And again I point out that it’s just what they did for the project to survive, it’s clearly frankensteined from the cheapest sensible parts. In your analogy the i3 with 32 or 128GB of RAM, if sold at the same price, will preform the same for most users.