Complete waste of CPU, Memory and Disk space. A triple negative for all software.
Might as well download more RAM, since Chrome and these Electron apps are having a huge RAM-eating feast on my computer. /s
Nobody runs 20+ Electron apps. Really, nobody runs 20+ apps.
The only people who need to buy a laptop with more than 8GB of RAM in 2021 have a specific workflow that they already know they need the RAM for - and that workflow never involves Electron, instead it involves something like video/photo editing, 3D graphics work, CAD, virtual machines and/or containers.
Heck, even gamers get away with 8GB easily, with nearly zero games from the PS4 era hitting performance limitations at that level. And really, does your MacBook Air have the graphical capability to run anything that could take advantage of more?
Slack using 300MB of RAM to send GIFs around isn't your problem, and end users don't stare at the Activity Monitor all day counting their bytes.
Honestly, for simple use it is fine. I use Affinity Photo and it is nearly as fast as my Ryzen 3700/32GB box, and is faster in some instances.
For simple editing of home videos with Final Cut Pro taken with my DSLR, it is surprisingly useful. I wouldn't want to do big projects with it, but it is fine for what it is. I certainly couldn't say that about my Dell XPS that had 2x the ram and sounded like an industrial vacuum cleaner under any moderate load.
It runs World of Warcraft fine, which takes a decent amount of GPU power to run even though it is an older game.
I must be out of the loop on what constitutes as "decent GPU power", but my $600 desktop from 2014 plays WOW at max settings and 1440p without issue. Are there any other GPU benchmarks you've tried?
If you can run DOTA, League Of Legends, Fortnite, Rocket League, etc, and run your streaming/voice and text chat/browser apps simultaneously, then you're golden. And I think, for that use case, RAM is basically not a concern. Someone with an 8GB MacBook Air/XPS 13/X1 Carbon can do that exact workflow.
Ahem, you mentioned Fortnite in there somewhere. The XPS 13 and Carbon are both excellent machines in that regard, but there's some... arbitrary limitations on the behalf of the M1's Fortnite capabilities.