You're missing his pragmatic and creative solution to leapfrog the problem altogether.
Yes putting it in ram will be faster than downloading it over the network. I don't think anyone ever doubted that.
I imagine people who wanted to download it would just use kiwix. The potential to download isn't the part that makes this project interesting.
You're not wrong, but who's talking about 20 applications?
If this is such a good idea, let's just all use iscsi and mount the internet.
There are many things that can't be done on a phone that are possible on a PC. The reverse case is much harder.
Fortunately, I've had a fancy Silicon Valley job for 15+ years which now lets me afford many GBs of RAM if I wanted to but it was a different story in my 20s. I relied on free or almost free hardware to learn. And that free hardware usually lagged in specs.
I would not recommend running out and buying a new current gen Ryzen board+cpu or core i7-whatever and 128GB of new ram at ddr4-4200 prices.
Sure, RAM is always faster.
Well, why not shove it all into L2 cache and leapfrog RAM?
/first joke I ever made on HN