And that's before I decided to boot up a game with all of the existing applications
For me the £50 is well worth not having to care about pruning applications constantly!
Yes, you would still have to juggle if you really dont want to close your IDE, or lower judge how much RAM that docker container really needd, but also understand that OS’ and software allocate a huge portion of all available memory no matter what you have in the machine. Like you think you need 32gb for snappy performance and it is rational idea that all your processes absolutely need sequential memory blocks, but it isnt that true.
I honestly think you would just be smarter about your use of resources again.
With these benchmarks I am starting to lean more towards 32gb itself being the compromise. Simply because it doesnt cause you to budget resources, a luxury, but at the expense of these other benchmarks? And in the worst case we just have to wait a year or two before 32gb is offered in the M series package?