ESD causes anxiety and paranoia, very much like hygiene. There's a healthy common sense level of precautions, but some people do get just overly occupied. Industrial environments take these things to practical extremes because they require all the added insurance.

That said, I'm personally super averse to all unnecessary handling. Youtubers can't seem to keep their fingers off of their stuff sometimes.

The single best step you can take against ESD is not having fucking carpet

Regarding floating grounds, it isn't always about if the component has a path to ground. It is about the voltage potential between you and the device. This is why a grounded wrist strap with a current limiting resistor is important. Say you are at ground (0V) or 2000V for that matter, but the RAM stick is at 15,000V. When you touch it, the voltage will want to equalize. You really don't know your own voltage potential, so if you're ungrounded it will just equalize to you, possibly damaging the RAM. With a current limiting wrist strap to ground, it will safely discharge through you to ground without a massive current rush through the IC' s.

A cool real life example on a scaled up model would be people that work on 345KV/500KV power lines from a helicopter.