I think that these kind of comparisons are quite hard to make. Even back in 2014, Apple offered 16GB of RAM on the base model 15", just like they do today, but they now use much faster RAM (obviously) and give you many more options. The RAM prices didn't dramatically drop either in these 5 years.

The 2014 model you're considering was actually the 2nd configuration offered by Apple itself at the time (the cheapest with a dGPU), so I would compare it with the 2nd configuration offered by Apple today. This means the 16" with an i9, 16GB, 1TB and a Radeon 5500M that costs 2799$.

You could argue that getting the same amount of RAM 5 years later is not acceptable and you would actually be right, but today you still get double the cores/threads, much faster RAM, double the storage (and, again, much faster), a much more powerful GPU and a better display. So I'd say that the only big issue of today's MacBooks compared to 2014 ones is the RAM price.

It's not like competitors started putting more RAM in their laptops though, today 8Gb is still the standard.