It isn't 1970 anymore. You can get 32-bit ARM MCUs with tens of kilobytes of flash and multiple kilobytes of RAM for less than 10 cents.

We've long since reached a point where chips are cheap enough to be disposable. They are included in paper transit tickets and price tags. There is basically no market left where your volume is small enough that custom application-specific ICs aren't an option, but your volume is large enough that the cost of a few additional kilobytes of memory isn't massively outweighed by the developer time saved.

Want several megabytes of RAM and flash to run Java? That's the price of a cup of coffee!