a few months ago i went down a rabbit hole to see if a android user in 2022 could get by with 2gb of ram in a smartphone.
i was told "no, i needed at least 4 or 6 gb of ram" by many people of the internets.
my previous phone was a iphone 11, then a pixel 3. both phones had 4 gb of ram, and the UI/UX was increadibly smooth.
ive noticed that there are a ton of sub-$200 smartphones with decent specs and features, but have 2gb of RAM.
after taking a chance and buying a budget phone (alcatel 1B 2022) from walmart for $120 CAD, and my finding is that 2gb of ram is 100% usable as a phone used daily. this phone does run Android 10 Go, while my pixel 3 was running lineageOS 18.1 (android 11)
i have no issues running any apps (excluding games) at all, apps will take longer to load, (by a few seconds) but the UX between this phone and my old pixel 3 (4gb of ram) is almost indistinguishable from each other.
some apps are worse than others (my banking app) but most of the time the UX is imo pretty snappy for a $120 phone.
there is lag sometimes, i had installed lawnchair 2 launcher and did notice some lag (2-4 seconds) but this is not very common.