I lived with 16GB until last year and upgraded to 32 only this year, which I thought was a huge improvement. I suspect a lot of people are around this ballpark, especially if they have bought Macs. Mine is Linux, still. So containers are the “simpler” versions.
...wait, you and I are using "KVM" in different ways, then. To me, it means a switch that lets you use the same Keyboard, Monitor ("Video"), and Mouse for two different machines. Sounds like you're talking instead about a technique for running a VM on a single machine - which, from Googlin', I suspect is "Kernel-based Virtual Machine", a new-to-me term. Thanks for teaching me something!
On it, I run Ubuntu 24.04 as my host, and my guest is Lubuntu with 16GB ram and 80GB ssd for my KVM.
I almost always have 2 instances of PHPstorm open in both Host and and Guest with multiple terminal tabs running various agentic tasks.