@geo_c :-
Heh. Y'know, it's all relative.
I would guess that, over the years, many of us have come up with all kinds of 'work-arounds'.....to fix hardware issues.....to work around hardware constraints (CPUs, RAM, storage, networking, etc, etc.).....and sometimes simply to make our work-flow easier & more consistent.
A good many of us like to share our experiences - and what works for us - with this amazing bunch of people we have in the community. And of course, this then 'sparks' some people off at a tangent, thinking about something else, which may in turn evolve into something else that ends up benefitting the community.
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For me, the whole concept of portables dates all the way back to the latter days of XP. I discovered PortableApps.com; over a period of time, I experimented with a good many of them. The Redmond 'beast', of course, needs regular re-installing to clear the cruft out.....or it used to, at any rate. For my last couple of re-installs before I said "Enough is enough", rather than going through my usual re-install routine, I used portable applications wherever I could. And the whole OS became so much sweeter to use, less cumbersome, more responsive.....and it stayed like that.
A lot of stuff, I simply ran from a couple of the largest flash-drives I could find. Later, I moved many of them onto an external USB HDD (larger capacity, just as portable).
Fast-forward to today. It took a few years, but I eventually became comfortable enough with Puppy to want to start doing constructive stuff with it.....on top of which, I wanted to give something back to this amazing community that had given me so much help. I've packaged a whole bunch of stuff; so much, I can hardly remember half of it. Yet, floating around in the back of my mind had always been the idea of wanting to replicate what I'd done in XP's latter years on Puppy itself.
Browsers were the first things, because they're the one thing no online community can do without; they're the 'glue' that binds us all together, and keep us in touch with each other. Yes, there's a lot more to computing than just the internet, but it's astounding how central this huge interconnected mess of electronic wizardry has become to our lives, isn't it? So much so, that some companies have moved their entire business model on-line. Adobe, for one.....so they can milk you continuously, unceasingly, never-endingly.....or at least for as long as you NEED to use their products.
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I can't take all the credit for these portable packages, not by a long chalk. In so many ways, they've been a community effort; many folks have either helped out directly with code additions/modifications that have made scripts do what they're supposed to, or else with suggestions & tips to simply make them more usable. And of course, my own scripting skills have improved to the point where I feel comfortable adding stuff of my own devising......
The only thing I'll take credit for is that of assembling all this stuff into usable packages.....because if they're usable, I'm happy to run them myself. If they work for ME, I'm then happy to share.....but I will always give credit where credit is due.
My Puppies are starting to get to how I envisaged them, several years ago when I first joined the Puppy community.
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As for the comment about space not being so important anymore, well; again, it's relative. My previous rig was inherited from my sister when she moved from XP to 7; as a 2005-vintage machine, it WAS pretty limited. I upgraded it to within an inch of its life, but was always limited by the fundamental DDR1 4 GB maximum. With this new rig, not only have I now got a way more powerful, efficient, far faster and less thirsty CPU that'll run rings around the old one in terms of what it can do, I've been able to 'max' the board out all the way to 32 GB of DDR4 RAM. I have so much more space to play with now, the sense of freedom it gives is quite intoxicating at times! 
DDR5 is almost upon us.....and they're already working on DDR6 in the wings. Over the next 2-3 years, 64-128 GB of RAM is going to become commonplace. So, no; space is NOT the constraint it once was. Trouble is though, it encourages lazy coding.....
I could run pretty much any OS I wanted on here. But even though this current rig is no longer really a 'Puppy box', I stay with Puppy 'cos I'm used to it; I know what I'm doing with it; I like the way it works and its philosophy of how it does things.....and above all else, I love this community of ours, and the people in it.
Like I say, it's all 'relative'.....and, talking of which, you might find that your sym-links survive better if you make them 'absolute' links as opposed to 'relative' ones. Because an absolute link uses the full $PATH, it doesn't matter where it goes, it still finds its target, whereas a relative one has to remain "in relation to" its target (not the correct way of looking at it really, but it's how I think of things!)
Mike. 
Without them, I would also just be someone waiting for someone else to feed me.
I thought that was very odd. But then --under Bionicpup64 [still my daily driver]-- when selecting just sylph-searcher in PPM's Search I got this: