Looking at activity monitor, I'm currently using ~19GB, doing nothing special (IntelliJ, 15 chrome tabs, Spotify, Slack). Docker Desktop was using 8GB before I killed it. And this is on an Intel Mac so it doesn't include GPU memory usage I believe, which is shared in M1 Macs.
This likely isn't a perfect metric, if I were closer to the limit I think MacOS would get more aggressive about compression and offloading stuff to disk but still.
Browsers generally allocate RAM with abandon but any one process is not necessarily memory bound. It just means that they are using that as page cache.
This likely isn't a perfect metric, if I were closer to the limit I think MacOS would get more aggressive about compression and offloading stuff to disk but still.