I could be wrong but it really sounds like you're talking about production. If that's the case then yes, I can respect the RAM requirement and it's almost too o

I could be wrong but it really sounds like you're talking about production. If that's the case then yes, I can respect the RAM requirement and it's almost too obvious to state that it isn't purposeless. The key here is it's a personal development workstation on which he has these resources. If that's a requirement, I would argue there's something fundamentally wrong with his development processes requiring that much data locally without even a server.