I run an IMac with 32gb because I’m a SharePoint developer. A 2012 VM running AD, DNS, SQL Server, Visual Studio, and a SharePoint farm all running takes up 16gb easily. The other 16gb goes to VS Code, XCode, Slack, multiple browsers, Outlook, Docker at times...etc.. Then I gotta shut it down and boot up the SharePoint 2010 VM sometimes which gets 12gb a little less I suppose.

I had 16 GB, got close to the limit working on a project with many containers, upgraded to 32. I leave open projects for 4/5 customers now which is very handy, no need to close and open. That alone is worth the cost of the extra GBs.

I run 64GB in a mac pro, with about 1/2 of it used as a cache for a zfs volume. With it taking half of my ram along with my other daily apps (safari, sublime text, etc) I’m only left with ~10GB free.

I had to move from 16 to 32 gb when I did hadoop development and needed to run a vm hadoop system locally. It all depends on your workload.