[snazz]

Are you swapping to the “VM” section of your APFS container on an insanely fast PCIe (NVMe?) SSD? That’s my guess. Although macOS does a great job of handling poorly behaved programs that use tons of RAM just to begin with.

[foldr]

I'm sure the fast SSD helps to mitigate the relatively small amount of RAM, yes. I can't say to what extent.