[treis]

>In several jobs in recent years I've also had to develop on very resource heavy Java applications which absolutely cripple my MacBook Pro 16GB when running a browser with several tabs ope

On the flip side, I've got 16 gb and when I've checked I don't think I've ever been using half of that. There's definitely scenarios where it could happen, but for general programming on non gigantic problems 16gb is plenty.

RAM is also less important these days with fast SSDs. With a spinning disk having to read a file was a performance killer. But SSDs have very high throughput and having to use the page file isn't as big of a deal as it once was.