Hot take: DDR4 is good enough for most use cases.

That's a lukewarm take at best.

Yeah I'm running a 5800x with 32gb of ddr4 that I've had since 2020 and have never needed faster RAM. I only use one program that maxes out my RAM, it's very infrequent I use it and I don't think a few kHz would make a noticeable difference in how long it takes to render.

When I decided to build a new system in 2023, I couldn't make heads or tails of 4 vs 5. Yeah, sure, it's faster... but no one could really say what that meant in practical terms. I think techpowerup had one rudimentary benchmark for RAM but it was inconsequential.

So I just went with what was cheaper. I also dodged a bullet by getting the slightly cheaper 12700k instead of the newer and allegedly just as fast 13600kf...

I don't really mind having DDR4 around for a few years more if that means the prices aren't so bad.
I'd really appreciate that, as I want to get more RAM for virtualization.

AI keeps eating all the top of the line hardware, but now they can earn the consumers money on top with yesterday's tech.