Kind of. Think of the RAM allowance as a “maximum” limit, not a reserved allocation. The VM host might have 64 GB RAM, and perhaps allows 20 VMS running in it at once. Each VM can allocate up to a max of 8GB from that host. Not everyone is running their VM at the same time, even if they are, not everyone would be running at their limit of 8GB of memory. If it does happen that 20 users are trying to use 8GB at the same time on one host, then it’s the same as anytime an OS runs low on RAM, it would start paging out to disk, everything would slow down for everyone. If that happens too many times, they could shuffle some users’ VMs around to balance the loads across hosts.

Can someone explain to me why it always seems like everyone on lemmy are in one of these two categories:

1: “I remember my first computer used ferro-magnetic beads that we glued to lengths of string. We could store nearly 10 bytes in one string”.

2: “My first computer was an old iPad that only had 64GB storage, couldn’t even store my photo album.”

It’s like everyone is aged either 89 or 19, nobody in between.

Probably because the RAM was pooled, but storage was not. So your RAM allocation is part of a larger pool that is shared between all currently logged in users. But your storage is allocated/reserved up front, and is used only by you.