I have 16GB of RAM and it's never run out of it. That's running with 8 processors.
A complete build from scratch for one box takes ~4hours on my i5-10210U laptop. On my (somewhat older) i5-2500K desktop (4 processors, also 16GB) it takes ~6 hours.
This is running Linux directly on the hardware. If you're using Ubuntu on Windows it will take much longer as the file-system access times on Windows are awful.
It never used to be that much of an issue, but on OE-A 5.0 if you end up running the QT compiles and nodejs at the same time (which happens quite a bit at the moment) they will run upto just under 32 GB of memory plus swap … and if not enough the build will crash