This is one of the biggest reasons for me, personally. It is such an inexpensive difference in overall cost versus the benefits of having that headroom.

Plus I am sitting at ~26gb used memory right now. I tend to give my VM's a nice big 8-12GB chunk of ram depending on what I am doing too, so it is almost like I have two machines in one.

The disks and data pipelines on these new machines are so fast though that I do wonder if the RAM's responsibility has shifted towards being a giant CPU cache and the disk has likewise shifted into a point where it performs more like RAM.

Maybe that’s the eventuality. I don’t run VMs much if at all for my work/day to day, but I have a desktop in the event I need to.

It depends on what you do, and always will. 16GB will be enough for web browsing, gaming, and coding websites in python 5 years down the line. 16GB is not enough now for.. say, compiling Firefox with LTO, at least while browsing.

I figure I will eventually pass this laptop on to a family member by the time I will be in the market for a new laptop, so I am not necessarily worried about that. I suspect my 2017 mbp would have worked fine for a few more years but I wanted to transition to a more portable device.