Anecdotal. I write client software for bioinformatics workflows. Usually web apps or clis. Right now with my mock db, Emacs, browser, and tooling I’m using ~5G of ram. At most I’ll use ~8GB by the end of the day.

I also shut down at the end of the day and make judicious use of browser history and bookmarks. If I were compiling binaries regularly I guess I could see the use in having more ram but as far as I’m concerned 8 is enough and so far people find what I put out perform at.