"Incredibly heavy user" here, my Windows 11 boots into 9GB thanks to a few tools and a LibreOffice preloader... then gets close to 16GB the moment I start a few VMs and some dev containers in VSCode.
Fortunately, when I got this laptop on a -50% sale with just 8GB, I made sure that I'd be able to add a 32GB memory stick... so now it keeps running with up to 20GB of cache, and it flies.