16 GiB was good 11 years ago but laptops were also sold around that time that maxed out at 8 GiB due to limited slots or soldered memory. And lots of laptops are still being sold today with 16 GiB of memory soldered in, with no upgrade possible.

(Some are still being sold with only 8 GiB, too, but I think those may be becoming outliers, or purposefully intended for only light use such as the MacBook Neo.)

Of course it also depends on what you use the computer for. For browsing and streaming 16 GiB is absolutely fine. For other uses 16 GiB can easily become constrained, though, even for tasks that a laptop can otherwise handle fine. And if the RAM in a recent laptop is non-upgradable, will it still be good 5 or 10 years from now?