I have a physical laptop that I do exactly that with and it does the job fine. It may not be as fast as my desktop but it also has 6 fewer cores. Also why would you not have a swap partition? That seems like you are asking for trouble.

Fwiw you're right, not having swap would render a system with specs like that nearly unusable in a modern workload however if you have decently fast storage you can assign yourself more swap than you normally would, say 8 gigs, to net you 12 gigs of working memory. It will be slow because programs will be dumped to disk frequently to make room for the active task but if you're patient it's usable.

On my MacBook for example: I run a super stripped down LMDE with a little bit of eye candy, not more than the tiny amount of onboard Vram can handle. My workload consist of writing rust in Lapce, reading documentation which I pull via wget and browse for with lynx) in a terminal using less. Occasionally I will run some retro games on the rig using DOSbox.

I've never encountered an OOM error on the system since deploying this specific workload, BUT this workload isn't something that would work for the average end user. YMMV but as it stands, those who follow the unix philosophy (do one thing and do it well) or the KISS philosophy (keep it simple, stupid) in deployment of tasks can generally get by with a lot less due to limited overhead.

I will mention that this is my hobby: since I was around 7 and was gifted a laptop from 1995 (in 2003) I've always striven to make my limited hardware go FAR further than it is intended or designed to, often to great success

I left a comment here but I'm editing it to remove it because frankly I don't care enough to argue with you.

I used it until very recently. It's not that bad, unless you're one of those people who keeps dozens of opened tabs forever. My experience was pretty smooth, to be honest. I did some academic works on such a machine and often had several tabs opened at once, each with a different paper opened, along with google drive and stuff opened at the same time, and got no issues.