Partly because I can, because unless you go absolutely wild with excess it’s the RAM equivalent of fuck-you money. (Note it’s unified though, so in some situations a desktop with 48GB main RAM and 16GB VRAM can be comparable, and from what I know about today’s desktops that could be a good machine but not a lavish one.) Partly because I need to do exploratory statistics to say ten- or twenty-gigabyte I/O traces, and being able to chuck the whole thing into Pandas and not agonize over cleaning up every temporary is just comfy.
I have 128gb in PC (largely because I can) and android studio, a few containers and running emulators will take a sizable bite into that. My 18gb MacBook would be digging into swap and compressing to get there.
Memory can get eaten up pretty quickly between IDEs, containers, and other dev tools. I have had a combination of a fairly small C++ application, clion, and a container use up more than 32GB when combined with my typical applications.
I just built a new PC with 64GB for just this reason. With my workloads, the 32GB in my work laptop is getting cramped. For an extra $150 I can double that and not worry about memory for the next several years
Running 128 GiB of RAM on the box I am typing on. I could list a lot of things but if you really wanted a quick demonstration, compiling Chromium will eat 128 GiB of RAM happily.
Nobody ever regretted having extra memory on their computer.
Several Electron apps and 1000+ Chrome tabs. (just guessing)