I do most of my data engineering in the cloud, or on a 32 GB Linux system - so I don't need a lot of memory for data sets - just something that will run the applications. I would never recommend that the average user buy more than 8GB of memory with a Mac Laptop.
Meanwhile - my 16 GB Linux Laptop (Ubuntu 20.04 Dell XPS 15 7590) routinely comes to a crashing halt if I try and do something crazy like open up 40 Browser Tabs and then start zoom. It's horrible. I've spent hours trying to see what's going on with top to no avail. If only it was a graceful degradation - but open a single browser tab on the wrong site once you are close to the edge- game over. Usually faster to just restart the system than wait for whatever swapping is happening to conclude.
I've rarely had this happen to me on the MacBook Air.
Different operating systems/hardware really seem to make a difference using pretty much the same workload, speaking from personal experience of someone who splits their time 50/50 on Linux and macOS.