alt Hacker NewsThat + full-disk encryption is why I went with BTRFS inside LUKS for my NAS.
They recommend 1GB RAM per 1TB storage for ZFS. Maybe they mean redundant storage, so even 2x16TB should use 16GB RAM? But it's painful enough building a NAS server when HDD prices have gone up so much lately.
The total price tag already feels like you're about to build another gaming PC rather than just a place to back up your machines and serve some videos. -_-
That said, you sure need to be educated on BTRFS to use it in fail scenarios like degraded mode. If ZFS has a better UX around that, maybe it's a better choice for most people.
1GB RAM per 1TB storage is really only required if you enable deduplication, which rarely makes sense.
Otherwise, the only benefit more RAM gets you is better performance. But it's not like ZFS performs terribly with little RAM. It's just going to more closely reflect raw disk speed, similar to other filesystems that don't do much caching.
I've run ZFS on almost all my machines for years, some with only 512MiB of RAM. It's always been rock-solid. Is more RAM better? Sure. But it's absolutely not required. Don't choose a different file system just because you think it'll perform better with little RAM. It probably won't, except under very extreme circumstances.