but has not graduated to issue worthy status
For me, only Rust compilation necessitates more RAM. But, I assume devs just do RAM heavy dev work on a server over ssh.
In the SWE world, dev servers are a luxury that you don't get in most companies, and most people use their laptops as workstations. Depending on your workflow, you might well have a bunch of VMs/containers running.
Even outside of SWE world, people have plenty of use for more than 8GiB of RAM. Large Photoshop documents with loads of layers, a DAW with a bazillion plugins and samples, anything involving 4k video are all workloads that would struggle running on such a small RAM allowance.
Of course, being developer laptops, they all come with 16 gigs of RAM. In contrast, the remote VMs where we do all of the actual work are limited to 4GiB unless we get manager and IT approval for more.
In enterprise, we get shared servers with constant connection issues, performance problems, and full disks.
Alternatively we can use Windows VMs in Azure, with network attached storage where "git log" can take a full minute. And that's apparently the strategic solution.
Not to mention that in Azure 8 CPUs gets you four physical cores of a previous gen server CPU. To anyone working with 4 CPUs or 2 physical cores: good luck.