Video game developers, video editors and graphic artists are the traditional professions where more ram is always better. But, in the days where nobody pays attention to memory usage, casual use can peg all of your ram and page the living daylights out of your hard drive[0]. I've had chrome eat up 32gb all on its own. No VM required.

[0]: https://www.macintouch.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=1046 (Spotify is killing SSDs)