I pretty much daily have to do a closing round to not run out of my 24GiB. That’s all web browsers
(Usually 100-200 tabs), vs code with some extensions and 2x4k display.
If you have multiple browsers with hundreds of tabs, the majority of those tabs are probably swapped out to your SSD already.
With swapfiles and SSD's, physical memory is less and less relevant except when you're performing very specific computational tasks that actually require everything to be simultaneously in memory -- things like highly complex video effects rendering.
How do you measure "running out" of your 24 GiB? And what happens when you do "run out"?
So I put on my engineering hat and pull up Activity Monitor and further observe (a) high memory pressure, (b) high memory consumption attributed to Chrome or Firefox, (c) high levels of swap usage, (d) high levels of disk I/O attributed to kerneltask or nothing, depending on macOS version, which is the swapper task.
I close some tabs. I then observe that the problems go away.
Swap isn't a silver bullet, not even at 3Gbytes/sec. It is slow. I haven't even touched on GPU memory pressure which swaps back to sysram, which puts further pressure on disk swap.
It's slow.
It makes it unrepresentative and doesn't contribute anything useful to the conversation about memory requirements for normal operation.
A bigger desk is not the solution to this problem.
You can run 4GB if you're fine with having most of your applications swapped out, but the experience will be excruciating.
Physical memory is still as relevant as it was 30 years ago. No offense but if you can't see the problem, you probably have never used a computer with enough RAM to fit everything in memory + have enough spare for file caching.