I am not using VMs (unless you count the JVM or something) and I regularly exceed 16GiB of ram. I offloaded my docker VM to another machine because it was so bad.

For context I regularly have open (what I consider to be standard apps):

* IntelliJ IDEA (Pycharm or Clion, never both)

* Slack

* Chrome

* kitty (20 or so terminals)

* Outlook

* yabai & bartender

* littlesnitch & adguard