To be fair, it isn't always a ram disk, it depends heavily on the distro.
On the 256MB test request, I plugged in my old CC Pandora, it powers up for a couple seconds, and then dies. I'm a little concerned but not so much as to try and fix it right this minute. Someone else'll have to check their Pandora.
There's one benefit for DraStic if you care, you can unzip larger ROMs to memory. I don't think it's a huge deal though, since you can just instead invest in a bit more storage space so you can unzip your ROMs (there's also an option to unzip ROMs to storage temporarily but it's kind of ugly)
For my sake it helps having more RAM, since I can open stuff like translation logs while the emulator is running with less risk of killing it.
I was looking for options of how to organize my swap space, and I found that zram is the cleanest one and easy enough to use. On my 512 MB pandora I can easily get extra 400 MB of swap while giving away only about 200 MB to zram. Sounds fair enough.