Earlier quoted context omitted.
RAM on MCUs is getting cheaper by the minute. A couple of years ago it was measured in bytes. Before the RP2040 is was measured in dozens of KiB now it's measured in MiB While I agree that 16 MiB is on the larger side for now, it will only be a couple of years for mainstream MCUs having that amount on board
Also curious what MCUs you're working with to give you this impression? RP2040 is 264k, RP2350 is 520k. I use NXP's rt1060 and rt1170 for work, and they have 1M and 2M respectively, still quite far away from 16M and those are quite beefy running at 500MHz - 1GHz.
These both have FlexSPI controllers capable of interfacing with $3-5 in PSRAM at 8M or 16M.