In my experience it's pretty easy to run up against the 16 GB limit on the MBP if you're running Slack, a browser, a couple of IDEs, and Docker.
Meanwhile, Visual Studio Code uses ~400M when freshly opened and ~550M with the same file (with similar plugins where available). Admittedly, VSC offers far more functionality, but the memory increase is still sizable.
I know that those (Slack and VSC) are vastly different programs with vastly different purposes, but even a minimal Electron app is going to have ~100M baseline memory, which is going to be used again with each and every Electron app that gets launched, in addition to the runtime overhead.
A common response to this is that "RAM is there to be used", but that RAM would have been used anyways for caching (which would have increased overall IO performance across the system) if these apps didn't hog it all. This fact becomes especially relevant when doing tasks that require lots of data (machine learning, compilation, etc).
That being said, I acknowledge that browser runtime based apps make it much easier to develop cross-platform applications, a fact for which I am grateful for as I run Linux. I think that a reasonable solution going forward would be if Electron (or another similar runtime) offered a way for multiple installed apps to share one running application. Ideally, of course, this would be offered natively by the browsers themselves, but given the technical hurdles to doing that _safely_, I'd easily settle for the former.
I should have rephrased my original question - is any significant share of the market running into issues? Because everyone acts like this 16GB limit is something a huge chunk of people currently need.