I have a Ryzen 3 1200, a lot more powerfull than the i3, and gtx1050. While my vram does get fully utilized in games, it rarely hinders my framerate at 1080p.
The gtx 1050 is a entry level card to begin with, so the settings your realistically going to be running at arent going to overwhelm the 2gb frame buffer. With new, texture-heavy games at higher resolutions and settings, yes 2gb isn't near enough, but the i3 isn't going to run those anyhow. With his CPU, he isn't going to have any issues with the video card being the limit unless he tries to run 4k or something crazy.
On another note, windows doesnt use that much vram at idle with my setup, which is probably closer to what he has. I have 1 1080p monitor, and wallpaper engine is the only thing using vram at idle. If you run win 10 with 1 or 2gb of system ram, the idle ram usage will be much lower than if you have 32gb ram. Id guess if you gave windows 10 a gpu witb 16gb of vram, i bet the idle usage would be alot higher than if you only had 2gb vram.