EDIT: Okay, https://www.geekwire.com/2018/firecracker-amazon-web-service... says my "pretty sure" memory is in fact correct.
[1]: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/nsdi20-paper-agache.pdf
mainly it's optimized to run code only shortly (init time max 10s, max usage is 15min, and default max request time 130s AFIK)
also it's focused on thin server less functions, like e.g. deserialize some request, run some thin simple business logic and then delegate to other lambdas based on it. This kind of functions often have similar memory usage per-call and if a call is an outlier it can just discard the VM instance soon after (i.e. at most after starting up a new instance, i.e. at most 10s later)