[phyrrus9]

Is this in contrast to PCIe, which I'm assuming is to eventually replace SATA? And what kind of programs are you running? My god, I don't think I've even come close to using even 8GB of ram at one time.

I'm using NVMe hard disks. NVMe right now iirc only supports PCIe interface via a 4-bit full duplex serial bus. In comparison to SATA's 1-bit serial half duplex bus.
Programs:
VMRC
Chrome (many, many tabs)
VS
SSMS
Discord

I see. I now feel inadequate using AHCI.

In the future, I'd expect NVMe to take over. Right now, very few manufacturers use them by default. Apple has switched to ONLY NVMe now, which is neat. Hopefully the prices will go down too. Right now, for Samsung NVMe (which I think are the best, they just have a way of making excellent storage devices) cost about $0.98/GB, so it's a tad on the expensive side. Other companies (like Intel) are destroying the name of NVMe by selling small (8-32GB) disks and pretending they're RAM (Intel Optane Memory).