Ha no, I'm using 9.98Gb of ram with literally just a single tab browser window open in Mojave. You'll be swapping constantly with anything resembling a normal workflow.
It's memory management, not memory minimalism. I'm always hovering about 12 GB out of my 16 GB MBA, but never have any issue opening a project or opening 10–20 tabs (rookie number) and I have a few apps that are always running. I believe that macOS uses the RAM for caching files, so the reported usage is not really tied to the number of apps running. There are memory-heavy workflows, but these are outliers. Even 8 GB would be fine for most of what I do.
Did you just say Mojave? Because I have extensive experience with Mojave and it does not use swap whatsoever. Instead, you have overcommit and memory compression. That application that the OS says uses 10GB of RAM does not actually.
It doesn't - that's exactly why people have workstation with a ton of ram. As soon as you have to hop over the pci bus, you're looking at 1/10th of the speed.