For me the Android emulator in conjunction with a fairly large react native dev server and an ide is enough to fill 16gb. I've had to resort to closing the ide before starting the emulator, and waiting for the first build to complete or things get OOM killed. If I run the test suite whilst the emulator is open then there's a good chance something will get killed as well.

This looks like it could be a compelling choice for my next laptop but will have to pass if it's not possible to go to 32gb

This only happens if you’re the type to keep 70 tabs (or whatever) open. I run 16GB and have never, ever had a browser cause me to start heavily paging.

>This only happens if you’re the type to keep 70 tabs (or whatever) open.

not really, you can just leave a leaky or script-laden page open for awhile to see the same behavior, depending on how things are put together.

example: blue iris is a cctv package that has a webui module. That web-ui client-side browser tab will inflate to system-memory size if allowed within a few days.

Not much of a point other than there are other (probably pretty esoteric) things that one can do to a browser that'll make them fall apart even on modern hardware.

Also keep an eye out on all those extensions...