How is ~12GB ram comical? It's a lot easier for the common consumer to get 16 gigabytes of RAM today that is to get the kind of network speeds we're talking about here.
16GB of RAM is only $55-$65 depending on the speed, and 64GB SSDs are around the same price. Compare that to the price of one of those 12GB games, and you can see that local storage bottlenecks need not be a problem for gamers.
Sort of. 12GB (I presume you meant GB) still takes a minute or two to move around locally- storage isn't fast enough to flush 12GB in seconds.
Now, if your device just had comical amounts of RAM, you could manage it.