Ummm.... Let's think - running more VMs at once, working on huge images in PS with all the plugins installed, CAD, 3D rendering, (i believe) building 3D maps in some games, ZFS with a few drives, databases (inc in memory ones)... ...oh, & showing off a little - though you really need 64GB+ to do that these days... ...not an exclusive list, but it's a start.
For internet browsing, documents, spreadsheets and games, yes. But there are plenty of high memory applications as well as pocket demon has demonstrated.
Yeah Photoshop eats up a lot of RAM if you work on large image files with a lot of history states and a large number of layers. I'm working on relatively small files at the moment and I can reach 10GB of RAM very easily. Being on an older platform I don't have to go all the way to 32GB and happily make do with 24GB, although I now know that 12GB simply wouldn't cut it for me, and 16GB would probably be a push as well.
I have 16GB in my (fairly) new system, and I'm regularly seeing 90% usage just from internet browsing with a couple of other small programs open like Outlook and Spotify. But I do tend to have a huge number of tabs open, and Chrome seems to use as much memory as it can. Having a lot of Youtube tabs really seems to eat up the memory. When I want to play a game or use another memory intensive program I have to close down Chrome or at least some of the tabs - if I knew I would go through memory like that when I was speccing my system in December I probably would have gone for 32GB.
Running Dungeon defenders 2, Football manager and league of legends uses 6gb of ram. Without going crazy in firefox or chrome not sure how you use more than 8-10gb ram in a general usage pc. Video editing is a bit different. VM Stuff, Photoshop can all use alot of ram though.
