It's not the drive space that's the issue, but rather holding >8GB of UTXOs (thanks to ordinals, monkey jpegs, stamps, etc) in 8GB of RAM and needing to verify it all, not being able to, and then needing to thrash a slow external and poorly powered USB drive in the attempt. A new sync is now probably out of the question. Continuing with one already synced will be a struggle up until each block takes >10mins to verify, at which point... dead.

average consumer laptop in 2024 needs at least 32gb ram

rpis dont even run web browsers properly, why would you need to run bitcoin node on low end hardware? 5 years forward, and average consumer laptop has 64 gb ram and its ddr6.