I think what’s lost here is when the framework project was launched, all the companies were moving to SoC designs and reliability was unknown.
Replacing a stick of ram is still much cheaper than buying a whole new MacBook, but these systems seem to be reliable enough that ram failures aren’t front of mind. Same for SSDs.
Gaming laptops tend to have replaceable RAM and SSD so the advantage of Framework 16 is much less.
> replacing a stick of ram
How often does your RAM fail you?