[carver]

Agreed, in most situations.

One counter example:

If your processes in sum tend to A) access many disk locations, at large total disk space B) hold a lot of underused data in ram

This isn't totally impossible. Maybe an Ethereum node with a script doing a bunch of data reads, running side by side with hundreds of Chrome tabs, few of which are regularly accessed. (Totally hypothetical, of course...)

Swapping some rarely used ram out so the OS can buffer disk into ram seems like a reasonable approach (although maybe even more reasonable is: close some tabs).

Your point still stands that more ram is strictly as good or better performance in this scenario, but you might be able to get an equivalent performance boost much more cheaply with some swap space for the underused ram. Also, upgrading past 32 GB ram starts to veer from expensive to impossible on a laptop.