[foldr]

>Most users don't need 3 whole Thunderbolt ports either, why put that on there too?

At a guess, because varying the number of physical ports between models complicates production more than varying which RAM chips are soldered to the board. (Apple has generally shunned having physically identical USB-C ports with differing capabilities.)

>If you're doing it to non-replaceable flash storage, then yeah there is something inherently wrong about relying on swap.

All modern multitasking desktop OSes rely on swap and have since the mid 90s.

SSD lifetime concerns are way overblown in my opinion. The first MacBooks with soldered SSDs came out in 2016. I'm sure there are individual instances of SSDs failing, but the much-heralded SSD lifetime apocalypse seems not to have materialised.

What you really want with an SSD isn't the theoretical highly-conservative estimate of its lifetime write limit, but the probability that it is going to be the thing that fails on your laptop after n years, in comparison to all the other things that could fail. My guess is that by the time the SSD has a significant probability of failing (which is going to take many years, even with heavy usage), then many other components are going to have a higher probability of failing.

[smoldesu]

As someone in possession of a perfectly functional 15+ year Macbook, what other components do you expect to fail?

[foldr]

Sorry, I don’t completely understand the question. Lots of things could fail. I don’t have stats on the relative probabilities.