Depends on the OS. They can be chopped down by removing windows aero / transparency features among some other memory hogs, plus if it has an nvme then virtual memory can do some fast enough heavy lifting. That being said, I think the last OS Microsoft made that could run functionally on 4gb without significant virtual memory useage is Windows 8 and I wouldn’t wish that experience on you, nor recommend it for security reasons. If you use Linux you probably won’t need to upgrade for a long while with that easy workload.

My pi 5 acts like a normal decent computer on Linux builds but windows would crunch it.