If it’s a leak in a mod and some pages just aren’t being accessed at all, then I’d think that the OS might be able to just page them out.

It might be possible to crank up the amount of swap you have and put that swap on a relatively-fast storage device. Preferably NVMe, or maybe SATA-attached SSD. I mean, yeah, SSD prices are up too, but you don’t need all that much space to just store swap, and it’s vastly cheaper than DRAM.

If you have a spare NVMe slot on your system or a free spot to mount a 2.5 inch SATA drive and SATA plug, should be good.

If you have a free PCIe slot, doing a quick Amazon search, looks like a PCIe card with a beefy heatsink to provide an M.2 slot to mount a single stick of NVMe can be had for $14:

https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-NVMe-PCIe-Aluminum-EC-PCIE/dp/B084GDY2PW

And a 128GB M.2 stick of NVMe for $20:

https://www.amazon.com/GALIMU-128GB-XP2000-Gen4x4-XP2000F128GInternal/dp/B0FY4CQRYF

I have no idea the degree to which “lots of cheap, fast swap” helps. It will probably depend a lot on a particular use case. In some cases, probably about as good as having the memory. My guess is that in general, it’ll tend to be more helpful on systems running lots of programs than on systems running one large game (though a leak might change that up), but hard to say without actual testing.

If a flash storage device is really heavily used, I imagine that it’ll probably eat through its lifetime write cycles relatively quickly, but if nothing else lives on the device, no biggie if it fails (well, not in terms of data loss for stored stuff), and I don’t expect it being 5 or 10 years until DRAM prices come back down, so it doesn’t need to last forever.

Probably be interesting to see some gaming sites benchmark some of these approaches.