I'd love to hear any kind of citation about this "avoiding of last 512MB", because after the initial screaming, the issue kinda disappeared and pretty much ever

I'd love to hear any kind of citation about this "avoiding of last 512MB", because after the initial screaming, the issue kinda disappeared and pretty much every open-world game I threw at it ran just fine on High @ 1080p (or even 1440p in many cases). Sure, the numbers in benchmarks do drop off, but what was the actual effect when you ran an actual game on it? I never had to "avoid" anything and haven't really seen any notes about doing that outside the benchmark readers.