Back in 2000 I got the M1 Air with 8G of RAM (needed the cheapest Mac to test some arm64 stuff) and that laptop served me very well. I never felt RAM-limited. I was always expecting to run out of memory during a big Bazel build or something, but never did.

It isn't the most powerful computer in the world but I never ran into any problems... so it's probably an OK compromise for most people, especially in the world where RAM is scarce because of AI datacenter buildouts.