I was wondering if your tool was displaying cache as usage, but I guess not. Not sure what you have running that’s consuming that much.
I mentioned this in another comment, but I’m currently running a simulation of a whole proxmox cluster with nodes, storage servers, switches and even a windows client machine active. I’m running that all on gnome with Firefox and discord open and this is my usage
$ free -h
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 46Gi 16Gi 9.1Gi 168Mi 22Gi 30Gi
Swap: 3.8Gi 0B 3.8Gi
Of course discord is inside Firefox, so that helps, but still…
Podman not because of security but because of quadlets (systemd integration). Makes setting up and managing container services a breeze.