4 GB is maybe small nowadays, but memory-intensive is relative.

I'd argue that _most_ programmers or even data analysts don't need more than 8 GB to perform their actual work.

But realistically they need 16+ anyway because of opening 200 browser tabs, memory-heavy IDEs, etc. 32 or 64 is nice for sure, but definitely not needed for actual "work" workloads for the most part.

Having many browser tabs open (for research) is part of the 'actual work'.

They need 16+ anyway because of running 2 or 3 Electron apps.

Memory intensive work wasn't the topic of conversation. GGP's comment was about how often he had to reboot his laptop despite it's immense memory budget, not about how much faster it was at performing memory-intensive tasks.