Placing lots of foliage makes editor use tons of ram on launch. Is this normal?

O_o

You need to use lods, culling, load levels…

My advice: Just put some grass and continue the project…

https://portal.productboard.com/epicgames/1-unreal-engine-public-roadmap/tabs/80-unreal-engine-5-1-in-progress

"The primary focus of Nanite for 5.1 is the addition of a programmable rasterization framework, opening the door to features such as masked materials, two-sided foliage, pixel depth offset, and world position offset. "