I monitor the RAM usage of my work machine with prometheus, and I haven't been above 16GB yet. This is on a machine with 40GB RAM and swappiness set to 1 (don't swap unless you reeeeeeeaaaalllyyyy have to).

This is running Linux rather than macos though, but it shouldn't really matter. I do have loads of web junk loaded. (Slack, Gmail, Gcal, YT music, Fastmail, plenty of browser tabs)