CK3 RAM Usage

[Finarfin]

Do mods drastically increase the memory used by this game? If I add a few, non-cosmetic mods, e.g., CFP, Holy Trinity, EPE, etc., the game ends up using almost 16 GB of RAM, which is my system max, and usually causes a crash. Is it normal for mods to use this additional RAM? I don't recall these issues before, but I've just started playing again with a fresh install of the game and a new download of all the mods I want to use.

For comparison, without mods CK3 is only using ~12 GB. Is it just simply necessary to have more than 16 gigs of RAM if you want to drastically alter the gameplay/