No. It doesn't. Mac OS runs fine for this with 8GB

Define fine. Tahoe, chrome, electron apps running with pretty much anything else already push things over 4gb when things start to get laggy and usability becomes more problematic, atleast to me. You could theoretically run a lot of things ‘fine’ the way you describe. And for the college student who hopefully doesn’t already run Spotify and Discord, it’ll hopefully be “fine”.

I just don’t get arguing that it’s the same experience as what people actually consider fine.