Why not? The only thing that really eats ram is chrome tabs
32GB+ RAM on laptop lets me run complete micro-services production-like environment (Java, VM, Docker) locally with efficient development/debug capabilities.
And that is at any place where I can get electricity and LTE/4G/3G which is enough to git pull/push or check on-line docs few times a day.
Running a Docker container for SQL Server and doing some work with pandas will eat up my 16gb pretty easily.