This cost of RAM

.... you prefer they use more EWE ?

Oh dear, the dad jokes are out in force  ;-)

However on a serious note, I doubt if any ISP will go back to simple modems, but I did like my VMNG300.

It's a very wooly thread. 

It's the shortage of silicon wafers boosting the costs, so it would invariably effect the production of all IP devices, you might have to provide your own devices in order to keep their costs down.

We are in a time where RAM and SSDs are stripped from used office laptops and recover good money leaving behind a pile of cannibalised laptops to scrap.

This is actually a good question, and the answer is no. VM has produced hubs for years for multiple good reasons and this won't change. And having a modem separate from a router will increase the overall need for RAM.

In any case VM's hubs are already engineered to use minimal RAM for running the Linux OS, the web admin interface, the DHCP server, the firewall's state table, VM's remote‑management agent, Wi‑Fi management, NAT table and routing control, logging and diagnostics and firmware update system. However it's hardware which does the heavy lifting with SoCs for packet routing / NAT acceleration and a dedicated ASIC to offload heavy packet processing from the main CPU.

Running low RAM can affect performance under load, but VM (or rather its Liberty Global master) won't add RAM costing £2 per hub at a total cost of £10m — a significant expense for minimal perceived benefit to most subscribers.

In summary hardware (ASICs and specialised chip blocks) handle the majority of the heavy-lifting tasks, while software mostly orchestrates and manages things. Incidentally, if you've ever wondered how STBs like the V6 and 360 can process that heaviest of demands (switching channels which usually takes well under a second), it's the same answer: hardware does the heavy lifting and these boxes also run minimal RAM.

ram as much as you can into the sockets... I don't think there's enough economy to pay for it all though.