A standard Ubuntu installation plus the mentioned proprietary GPU-Driver package are using ~4GB of the available file system capacity.
Thats way to much to fit into a ramdisk while having enough RAM left for OS. Most of the nodes in the GPU mining farms I know have only 4GB of RAM at all.
So there is some optimisation needed to shrink the filesystem usage by getting rid of the things that are not necessary on the filesystem to run the OS. Source files, man pages, caches and so on. At the end of this optimisations you have a system which is much more lightweight but does still have the same well known usability.
Having a more lightweight storage footprint than a "classic linux distro" is the key to be usable for network booting and diskless operation at scale on hundreds of nodes.
Coinboot also has a highly customized Early Userspace (https://github.com/frzb/coinboot-debirf/blob/427b5fb8f3b9313...) so after extracting the root fs onto the ramdisk, additional file archives a.k.a. Coinboot Plugins can be downloaded and extracted on the root file system. This is how the plugin system of Coinboot works, which enables the extension of the core system without repackaging the Initramfs archive.