I’m not aware of anyone (except those using VMs) who are complaining about the memory. I personally went from 16gb to 8 and don’t miss it. Do you actually own/use an m1 Mac?
However in 2021 I am not interested in a computer with less than 32GB ram. Sure, I could work around the limitations and close not in use programs/tabs to avoid going OOM, or using swap, but life is short and memory is cheap. I'd rather not have to worry about it.
There are workloads that don't fit into 16G ram. Even with paging, there are legitimate needs for 32G and beyond memory sizes.
Then your limitation clearly wasn’t RAM.
It can't make it appear out of thin air. If you need 16GB of ram and only have 8GB, you will run out of memory.
For context I regularly have open (what I consider to be standard apps):
* IntelliJ IDEA (Pycharm or Clion, never both)
* Slack
* Chrome
* kitty (20 or so terminals)
* Outlook
* yabai & bartender
* littlesnitch & adguard
The ONLY time I run out of memory (or leave the "green" memory pressure) is when i use Figma - but that is a known memory hog. And it does crash, it just warns me that im running out of memory and asks to close something.
This is all on an 8GB machine. Previously I had 16GB intel macbook pro (2015) and it simply wasn't possible to run this quantity of applications.
Obviously (as i have said, and keep getting downvoted for), if you are using VMs or you have a specific memory requirement, then you need to account for that.