It’s incredibly stingy. For a while you could make the argument that a lot of Air purchasers wouldn’t need it, but I don’t think that’s the case any more. My wife has an M1 Air with 8GB and between Office, Chrome, Teams, and Slack she quite regularly gets beachballs and weird performance hitches.
Never had it with Windows. Or iPad, or iPhone. Why does the pro computer do this? My guess is 5k external monitor and a few desktops, but...really. I'm not running multiple layers of VM's, it'll crash it with a few VS code windows, browsers, command lines.
What is that?
I've been using macs for decades, and I've never seen or heard of such a dialog.
The only application I ever need to terminate is Notes, which for some reason is extremely crash prone on the mac.
Open 1000tabs and it will kill any machine.
In any case, it's pretty easy for the OS to swap out browser data as it is chunkable by tab. Just because it had allocated 22GB doesn't mean that it was all active. Must was certainly swapped to SSD.
Considering how bad all of that is about "weird performance hitches" (read: running an entire browser for every single app) are you sure that has anything to do with the memory?
Those are like the heavyweights of the app world. And I think the 4 combined is running more code than the OS itself (the last three are 3xChrome).
Using Slack as a web app[1] solved my issues with it. It runs using Webkit instead of Electron, which is far smoother.
