I find it easy to sneak up on 16gb of memory when running basic apps (editor, bunch of browser tabs, zoom, spotify) plus a complete environment for a mid sized web app (multiple services, dbs, message queue, caches, js bundler, workers etc), especially if I’m running tests and have mobile device VMs up. Pretty cheap insurance over the life of a machine to get 32gb of RAM and never have to think about it.
Perhaps you're correct that I don't need it in the sense that I only very occasionally find myself with a dataset or something that doesn't fit in memory, and could just run a high memory cloud instance for a bit to process it.
Even still, my experience of desktop Linux under memory pressure has been frustrating, even with fast SSDs, and overspeccing the memory is an inexpensive guarantee that my system will never start thrashing during an important screenshare demo or something, so it's an obvious choice if I'm shopping for a new computer.
When I built this computer last year the cost difference between 16 and 32GB was like $40...easy to justify a 2-3% premium on the overall cost of the machine to never have to give a second thought to conserving memory. That said, Apple charges $400 for the same upgrade (in their machines that support 32GB), so the calculus there is a bit different.
Desktop Linux tends to be a bit of a memory hog compared to MacOS. I think a lot of Linux users would be surprised how usable even the 8GB macs are for most tasks.
