As a normal, boring user that does nothing special other than browse the internet and the occasional "casual coding" -- what am I supposed to do with 32GiB of ram?

you can disable paging (swap) i guess apart from launching more things at the same time and letting apps know you have ram for them to cache shit (check app settings some apps do have a how much ram should we use slider like okular the kde pdf viewer) and virtualisation of multiple os's i can't think of much