Not Docker, webpack. Your run-of-the-mill webpack dev server will happily gulp gigabytes of RAM, and pray that your frontend dev stack only runs one of them. Your IDE will probably use a few more gigabytes on top of that for static analysis and autocompletion, and that's how you need at least 8-10GB to run develop your average mid-size web app without swapping.

not docker, but the linux virtual machine that docker on mac has to use because mac os has no other way to run containers (which would mean running linux binaries anyway).

on linux you would have pretty much no overhead from running software in containers.