Its just race for the specs.
Far from it.
If an SoC with big.LITTLE architecture has 6 or 8 crores, then there will be two sets of cores each with their own power and performance profile. You don't need a blazing fast CPU to handle normal UI. During that time, a low performance lower power core will be used to save battery. When running a game, high performance cores will be used.
In earlier iterations of this technology, only either of low performance or high performance cores used to be active. So technically even if it has 8 cores, practically, only at most 4 cores can be used. In the latest iterations, this has also been remedied. Depending on the task, any Combination of cores can be used.
The Mediatek Helios X20 is a 10 Core SoC that extended the big.LITTLE by having 3 sets of cores for low, medium and high performance needs.
There is also the alternative where they pack a big number of only low power cores to make mid end SoC.
While advertising can be misleading to the novice, there is real meaningful technology behind the scenes.
Calling it a race for specs or marketing is just absurd. We have already hit a wall in how much a single monolithic CPU can handle.
Increasing count of cores and building packing in specialized cores is the way forward.
Yes, there will be some hurdles the biggest one of which is that the software is not catching up fast enough, but that is not the hardware developers fault. It is sheer laziness from programmers that we have software that does not use the hardware well enough.
Same holds for RAM as well. While one part of the problem is that software is not being optimized well enough, No amount of RAM is too much for a computer. Having more RAM simply means that you can have more stuff running. Smartphones are running desktop class operating systems. Android is Linux. iOS may have Apple imposed constraints, but remove those constraints and its still Free/Open BSD kernel.
The earliest PC's that I used in 1992 had a 5 MHz 8088 CPU and 32kB RAM.
The first PC that I bought in 1996 had a whooping 166 MHz CPU and 16 MB of RAM
The first smart phone that I had in 2004 had a 156 MHz ARM CPU and 64 MB RAM
The PC that I built back in 2011 and using to this day has 3.3 GHz quad core GPU and and 16 GB RAM.
The smartphone that I use today has 2.5 GHz quad core CPU and 3 GB RAM
Regardless of optimization and all, the kind of things that I run on my phone today is desktop computer class stuff. I personally felt many times that my phone would have been better with more RAM. So would it be surprising that newer phones will pack in 4 or 6 GB RAM?