> People wonder why the OS uses up all available memory
This is really no excuse to have Windows eating 12GB of RAM with an Edge (with 2 static tabs), excel some antivirus and Teams running.
This (12GB) is just sick.
The good news is: you do not understand how modern (last 30+ years) OS memory management works.
If you have free ram the OS will cache all the recently accessed things. It costs effectively zero to cache them when you access them, and it costs effectively zero to evict from the cache if you actually need the memory for "useful" work. And if the cached thing is useful in the mean time, you win because RAM is still orders of magnitude faster than SSD. None of the scenarios are a perf loss. The only scenarios are "win" or "no gain."
"But won't the next application I load, load faster if there is free RAM?"
If you are asking this question, please refer back to the previous concept -- "it costs effectively zero to evict from the cache if you actually need the memory for 'useful' work." This is where people typically get confused. They think it takes work to evict things from the cache, just like it would require work to remove frequently used objects from your physical desk if you needed to free up space.
Once you understand that the rest should fall into place.
This is really no excuse to have Windows eating 12GB of RAM with an Edge (with 2 static tabs), excel some antivirus and Teams running. This (12GB) is just sick.