I've seen my Firefox process peak at 67GB (uncompressed) when viewing certain webapps, and it regularly goes over 16GB (uncompressed; about 10GB compressed). With only 16GB RAM that's too much swapping. It's slow due to the swapping. I can't even do that any more, as that swap also needs more free disk space than I have.

I feel constrained in 16GB all the time, and it's mostly due to browser memory usage, whichever browser I use (Firefox, Safari or Chrome). However there are other things running too such as Discord, Telegram, VMware, Libre or MS Office; the GBs add up. If I dare to compile something big, I have to close other things. I'm not even one of those media creators or gamers using heavy graphics!

So, I currently have a late 2013 MBP with 16GB which is going strong still. It's still great, except for RAM and battery. I'm thinking of upgrading to an M2 Max 64GB or 96GB, because I don't want to be caught short with only 24/32GB the way I've felt heavily constrained by 16GB a few years after buying the 2013 MBP.

And I want to get into modern graphics, physics simulations, blockchain simulations, terabyte-scale database engine design, neural nets and chip design more than I have been. I expect those to be memory heavy, enough that even 96GB RAM will be a design constraint. (Then again that's what I said when I bought the 2013 MBP, and in practice I ended up using datacentre servers for the heavy stuff, so I'm still weighing up the purchasing decision, whether it's worth it).