> Browsers, very light photo editing, and email/school/office work is general use and this will do that for the next 10 years.

I'm currently running pretty much that exact use case on my M1 MBA (Firefox with 10 tabs open, Pixelmator Pro, Apple Mail, Apple Music playing a local playlist) and I'm at 12.5 GB of RAM used. This is also on Sequoia, from what I hear Tahoe uses more resources. I'm sure that Mac OS can do fancy things with memory compression, swapping, etc when memory pressure is higher, but if you're an individual you might as well buy a refurb M2 or M3 MBA with 16 GB of RAM for the same price as this and not have to worry about it.

That's why I said this seems more targeted towards schools. They want a fleet of brand new cheap laptops with a support contract, they don't want to bother with buying individual used laptops off of ebay.

If you aren’t using an 8GB Mac than you can’t tell how it would do. My 8GB Intel Mac Mini is just fine.