Stop letting them live rent free in your head.
It's a consumer product. WHO. CARES.
For the average user, these are fantastic. A laptop that lasts beyond the number of waking hours in a day and has no noisy fans with basically untouchable performance in that form factor. And YOU'RE STILL MAD...about the vocabulary that Tim Cook speaks with compared to Steve Jobs, who has been scientifically verified as being a completely different person. (I highly doubt Steve never said anything about loving Apple products, either)
In other words, Steve Jobs has been dead for almost 10 years, it's time to leave his personality cult. If you liked what he said better, it's probably because he was one of the best salespeople who has ever lived - that doesn't change what the product actually IS.
And oh my goodness, stop getting worked up about specs and industry-standard price segmentation practices. 99% of customers DO. NOT. CARE. The VAST majority of MacBook Air buyers buy the base model and don't need anything more than that. macOS is perfectly usable on 8GB, heck my parents are using 4GB on theirs and it works fine - yes, with Catalina. No joke, you need to open up something like 40 chrome tabs before it matters. RAM requirements have completely stagnated for anything but the most exotic workloads.