Tried that. There's still a limit on top of that.

That limit is 32 GiB. Hard to call it "fairly low". If you encountered a lower limit then it's something you can tune in login.conf.

32gb seems pretty low? pretty routine in a lot of different domains to have processes using 10s/100s of gbs

It's not pretty low, or objectively low, but it can be considered relatively low. The average amount of RAM in desktops and laptops is still <32 GiB. From this perspective it's a very high limit.

Many servers have over 32 GiB of RAM.

Get outta here, man. No way.

I routinely work with one with 256 GiB of RAM.

Parent was being sarcastic.

It kind of makes sense to expect 32 GB to fit every process on a desktop. But is that the main use case of OpenBSD? It would seem that the main use case would lean towards servers instead?

And you use that one to run minecraft servers. Riiiight.

I didn't say that?

Depends on what you do; I routinely use double that, and for me even my 64GB starts to be limiting.

Eight gigs was the least amount of memory I could buy this laptop with, and I'm using... 237M even with a few amfora and w3m running. Compiles will take more, but I stopped compiling horrible things like Firefox or Chromium years ago.