If the design cuts it so close that it can’t spare 1% of RAM, the system is in danger of crashing in production due to memory exhaustion.
Sure, at some point the impact of systems will matter and you should choose something else. At the point, you may also want to reconsider traditional Linux altogether in favor of a special low-memory variant or alternative.
It was not even 3%, it was a tenth of that: 0.3%
Even with 1GB of RAM, it would be 1.2%.
If the design cuts it so close that it can’t spare 1% of RAM, the system is in danger of crashing in production due to memory exhaustion.
Sure, at some point the impact of systems will matter and you should choose something else. At the point, you may also want to reconsider traditional Linux altogether in favor of a special low-memory variant or alternative.