I'm just wondering whether this method is still 'a thing' for saving VAS - or whether it has been debunked? I've not particularly had any VAS issues but I have been following this routine for a while - haphazardly. It's just a pain having to activate/deactivate sceneries before every flight, so just wanted to check whether it is still an effective exercise or just placebo.

Never disabled anything and never had an OOM. 

I disable them for load times and frames - no point in loading something like LFPG if you're passing over it at FL360. I just using the freeware scenery editor to enable/disable before launching P3D.

I use sim starter from Aerosoft to load and unload sceneries works really well

Thanks all.

I guess it depends on the area, the density of addon airports in that area, and how complex those addon airport sceneries are. I only fly GA and I have never had any VAS issues until I switched to VR with FlyInside, which adds a bit of extra memory usage because of the VR implementation. The first time I got an OOM error was when flying in Orbx PNW north of Seattle, where I have a lot of Orbx addon airports within a relatively small area. So I guess it would make sense in such a situation to disable some of the airports that you're not flying between (but I just dialled back a few P3D settings instead to free up some memory).