[faeriechangling]

Tons of gamers are on 8gb because of mobile GPUs and becuase the only affordable 12gb GPU Nvidia has ever released is the 3060 which is a desktop GPU. I don’t honestly expect 12gb+ to become mainstream until 6000 series.

[CivBase]

According to the Steam hardware survey, about 58% of the current-gen GPUs being used (NVIDIA 4000s and AMD 7000s) have 12GB+ of vRAM. I'd argue it's already mainstream - at least among "PC gamers". Obviously there is still plenty of old hardware out there, but I'm specifically focused on what people are buying new today because that's what OP was looking at.