> Apple Silicon got some huge wins from lower latency and massive bandwidth, but that came at the cost of making RAM fixed and more expensive.

The memory latency actually isn't good, only bandwidth is good really. But there is a lot of cache to hide that. (The latency from fetching between CPU clusters is actually kind of bad too, so it's important not to contend on those cache lines.)

> A lot of PC users scoffed at the default RAM sizes until they actually used one and realized it was great at ~8GB less than the equivalent PC.

Less than that. Unified memory means that the SSD controller, display, etc subtract from that 8GB, whereas on a PC they have some of their own RAM on the side.