And yet they work fine. Perhaps it is your priors that leave us wondering.

Memory compression combined with swap to very fast SSD storage are extremely effective.

Apple is well known for their extremely optimized software due to their tight integration with hardware and software. This would make sense to keep it 8GB for Apple-only software idealistically. Realistically, those modern software are not optimized for any OS. I had MBA M1 4GB, it wasn't enough. I imagine macOS put memory compression to constant heavy use and swap.

They aren't really usable in any meaningful way. Those low-end models get bought by people that mostly use them as Netflix/Facebook machines. I'm really not kidding about this; I have seen it with my own eyes. I have a friend who has a MacBook for the 2015 era, and I have only ever seen him use it to watch movies, the most tabs I have seen him use are maybe 5 and the most apps he ever used at once is probably 5 too, and just because he forgot to quit the torrent video player client I put there or something like that. It's all about prestige for social status. This is precisely why Apple can get away from selling hardware so compromised.

I told him many times that he could have gotten a computer at one third the price that would have done essentially the same thing just as well, but he doesn't believe it. He thinks Apple is obviously better and obviously longer. Even though I'm tech geek using Apple hardware before he even knew Apple existed. He also has a fetish for Apple cables and chargers, because somehow, they are the only ones who know how to build those things (not that they are bad per se, but there are better options at half the price...).

It's really a lot like a religion or some sort of cult at this point. Unsurprisingly this guy has a lot of beliefs about many things; true Apple fanboys are very often like that.

As far as I'm concerned, Apple stuff is pretty good but the pricing just doesn't make sense, especially nowadays considering of the locked everything down...