I've had an 8gb macbook Air m1, and it's honestly never been an issue even for dev stuff since my workloads just wouldn't run on my local machine anyway. It's much, much less of an issue than on my Windows laptop with 8gb of ram, too.

As for storage, yeah 240gb is probably not ideal for most people but since I bought the air mostly as a lightweight device I can carry anywhere instead of a workstation (even though it's insanely powerful for what it is) it does not really matter in my case.

(This is my first Mac so I was very worried of the pretty limited ram since I had no idea how macOS deals with memory, but if it's fine for me I'd say it's fine for most normal/casual users)