Update: This issue still exists, but I wanted to actually be able to play minecraft so I bought an extra 8gb of ram and with some fine tuning of optifine settings to turn off certain animated textures, I can now successfully play with minimal lag and no crashing. Personally my problem is resolved, but that should not have to be the solution for others having the same problem. I shouldn't have had to go buy double my ram capacity in order to play vanilla minecraft.
This is all in vanilla, no external or modded client is being used. 1.17 also uses the OpenJDK Platform binary instead of Java automatically. 1.17 actually runs at 92% of my Ram just from sitting on the title screen.
Update: This issue still exists, but I wanted to actually be able to play minecraft so I bought an extra 8gb of ram and with some fine tuning of optifine settings to turn off certain animated textures, I can now successfully play with minimal lag and no crashing. Personally my problem is resolved, but that should not have to be the solution for others having the same problem. I shouldn't have had to go buy double my ram capacity in order to play vanilla minecraft.