I also posted some other comments on memory usage recently.
https://duc.avid.com/showpost.php?p=...0&postcount=15
Maybe most useful there is mention of boot-args="maxmem=xx" and the memory_pressure utility that can help show how much more memory you have than might be needed to just do the job. If you suspect you are low on memory, deconfiguring say 8GB or 16GB and just see what happens can be useful. May or may not be helpful here, but might help others.
The complexity with VIs is not only is the DAW causing memory use and the operating system potentially then reducing then amount of physical memory actually used but the VIs are also managing memory, how much they allocate to memory resident sample caches or streaming buffers. Some may be configurable, some may be configured by the software based on systems configs, I'd expect some might change themselves if the system is running low on memory.