My iMac with 32G of memory sometimes gives me even out of memory dialogs because Safari has leaked about 30 gigabytes of memory by sitting idle with many tabs open. Reopening Safari fixes this, but it shows that these days even web browsing can put an enormous pressure onto the memory usage. And if you are running VMs on your machine you can use up 32G fast.
The thing is, the macbook pro is Apples "workstation" machine, by price and by the fact that they don't offer many alternatives. So people expect it to support workstation loads, and 32G and 8 cores is not excessive for that today.