What specific workloads? If you bought a 16GB machine to keep 32GB of data in RAM then clearly you bought the wrong machine. But I am able to run WAY more applications in 8GB than the 16GB intel Mac I had previously.
Then your limitation clearly wasn’t RAM.
It can't make it appear out of thin air. If you need 16GB of ram and only have 8GB, you will run out of memory.