Poor Storage Management?

My 12th gen PW SE is advertised at 32GB, but my absolute max available storage is 24.6 GB.

While there is overhead for all digital storage, this seems like an unusually large amount of wasted space.

Spoke with friends who work in IT and with computers and they said it’s way more of a size discrepancy than what you’d expect at the advertised amount.

My question- are older SE models more accurate with their available space? Has this always been an issue?