macOS Catalina RAM usage - 2GB at boot?
Memory is meant to be used fully then, only later once you have a “problem” does the OS optimize and compress based on pressure. Everything looks excellent, as designed and well in order in your examples. Even if you have some memory swapped, that’s no performance issue in practice. Only after excessive swapping and sustained memory pressure would any any slowdown be measurable or need for remediation on macOS that have the pressure graph prominently featured in Activity Monitor.
The only problem (if you can call it that) is taking older articles at face value and assuming this is not correct behavior. That problem is actually an opportunity to learn how the system is designed and what signals to pay attention to now when you are tuning for performance.
Here are some excellent places to get started on why Apple’s unix operating systems are not like others. Consider how many active hours of running OS Apple has with watchOS, tvOS, iOS, iPadOS, and macOS all running the same kernel, same scheduler, and most 24x7 and need no active tuning or management under very strict RAM budgets.

Can I force my Mac to make better use of the inactive memory? (and I disagree with much of this - purge is bad unless you want to test and hobble all optimizations and see how slow running without cached files are until they cache in again or you reboot / tune the apps you run)
Isn&#39;t Inactive memory a waste of resources?
What is memory pressure, and how do I relieve it?