1) 4GB—let alone 1GB—is already cramped with just Slack and any one of your usual bloated shitware issue trackers/wanky PM toyboxes (Jira, Asana) open in a tab or two, plus the usual few tabs of DDG/Google, Stack Overflow, some docs, et c. That's before any actual code-writing tools enter the picture. The basic suite of tools to just be working at all in almost any role is just barely not-painful to use on 4GB. Worst case you're in an agency and have all your tools, plus several duplicates for the same purpose for a client or three, and so on, all open. Yes, it's because all these tools are terrible and eat like 20x the RAM they have any right to and even that's generous, but I still have to use them.
2) Better hope you don't need any design tools at all. (Sketch, say) if you're trying to get by on 4GB or less for everything, unless you like only having one thing open at a time or dealing with UI sluggishness I guess.
3) Docker(-compose) or minikube or whatever? Service dependencies, local mock services? Running test suites? Without a strong CPU and 16GB you'll see slowdown.
4) A fan of any of the fancier webmail clients, like recent GMails or Inbox or Outlook or whatever? I'm not and just keep the Basic HTML version of Gmail open because its full-page loads are faster than the "speedy" AJAX garbage on those, but if you are into that sort of thing take a look at their memory use some time.
FWIW I think almost all the tools surrounding and supporting development these days are god-awful resource hogs that somehow still manage not to be very good and think 1GB absolutely should be enough memory to get by doing node/ruby/php dev, but I still have to work with that junk, and 8GB's the bare minimum to do that without hitting swap constantly, IME, and even with that you've gotta be careful. 16GB's much more comfortable, especially if you sometimes have to do things other that just Web dev.
I have 8GB here, under Debian. I can easily run docker (with a rails server), firefox (discord, slack, facebook, youtube, online radio + outlook webmail, all at the same time), with many Emacs windows.
I think I could manage to have less RAM (I frequently code on my chromebook with 2GB RAM). My theory is that the ram expands to the amount available https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
IIRC at my last employer an Asana tab + Slack ate ~1.5GB all on their own, and Asana was so slow to load that one hated to close it.
Jira's not as bad as Asana but depending on the set-up it can be pretty close. Then there's Invision, et c which are much lighter than those but still pretty damn heavy, if you're trying to get by on 4GB or less. And/or maybe you've got Outlook and Teams and all that. And that's just the communication & collab tools, not even any of the stuff to produce actual work output. Temporarily having to use a 4GB machine with that kind of workflow is why I'm now permanently on Basic HTML for Gmail—it loads fast enough I can close it, and uses so little memory there's no reason to. I couldn't spare the 300+MB for Inbox or whatever with all that other junk open, and besides, Basic HTML's much faster.
1) 4GB—let alone 1GB—is already cramped with just Slack and any one of your usual bloated shitware issue trackers/wanky PM toyboxes (Jira, Asana) open in a tab or two, plus the usual few tabs of DDG/Google, Stack Overflow, some docs, et c. That's before any actual code-writing tools enter the picture. The basic suite of tools to just be working at all in almost any role is just barely not-painful to use on 4GB. Worst case you're in an agency and have all your tools, plus several duplicates for the same purpose for a client or three, and so on, all open. Yes, it's because all these tools are terrible and eat like 20x the RAM they have any right to and even that's generous, but I still have to use them.
2) Better hope you don't need any design tools at all. (Sketch, say) if you're trying to get by on 4GB or less for everything, unless you like only having one thing open at a time or dealing with UI sluggishness I guess.
3) Docker(-compose) or minikube or whatever? Service dependencies, local mock services? Running test suites? Without a strong CPU and 16GB you'll see slowdown.
4) A fan of any of the fancier webmail clients, like recent GMails or Inbox or Outlook or whatever? I'm not and just keep the Basic HTML version of Gmail open because its full-page loads are faster than the "speedy" AJAX garbage on those, but if you are into that sort of thing take a look at their memory use some time.
FWIW I think almost all the tools surrounding and supporting development these days are god-awful resource hogs that somehow still manage not to be very good and think 1GB absolutely should be enough memory to get by doing node/ruby/php dev, but I still have to work with that junk, and 8GB's the bare minimum to do that without hitting swap constantly, IME, and even with that you've gotta be careful. 16GB's much more comfortable, especially if you sometimes have to do things other that just Web dev.