I bought a little 32 GB kit (x2 16GB) of DDR4 in February for ~$56; It is now $193.82, or about three and a half times the earlier price, so I’m going to have to agree with you that it isn’t really better (and may actually be worse for DDR5). I bought a refurb laptop this autumn with DDR5 RAM because it cost only slightly more than the individual kit would have been (and it came with a TB SSD and reasonable CPU, but has on-board graphics).

If SODIMM were much cheaper, it might be worth the performance degradation to use an adapter, but as it stands, I don’t think it is. If it comes down to what’s available to someone on an individual basis, it could be a good option.

Of course, everyone is hoarding them now.