I'm probably at sub-1gig after boot if I ignore the docker containers I have running in the background.
The complaints about Windows are mostly on low-end machines loading all kind of crappy background software that are always running and eating a lot of ressource for not much (very often antivirus, VPNs, file syncing stuff, "cleaning" software and more).
If you do not overload your Windows install with all kinds of useless crap it will just be better and snappier than macOS on the same amount of ressource. I can tell you that much from building some hackintoshes...
Funnily enough Apple software is notoriously bad on Windows, so I'm pretty sure where the problem is. Almost like making more money by selling more powerful hardware leads to shitty low end specs experience.
To be clear I think macOS is cool and a pretty good OS but the reality is that to make the most of it and the software that can run, you need a powerful machine that is extremely expensive, and even more so since Apple soldered the RAM/storage to control price.
This is precisely why there is outrage, everyone who has had an entry level Apple device knows very well how miserable an experience it is but also how much worse it will get.
On paper an iPhone 6s was "supported" for a long time; in practice it's 16GB of base storage made it almost unusable barely 3 years after launch. You could only install 10 apps at best and not put much music, or other media. The "real" price of an iPhone was effectively 200 more or something like that to access the relevant level of minimum storage that was advisable. But this way Apple gets to advertise a price, and instead of subsidizing better devices by making only a small number of variants and using an average cost for pricing they prefer to individualise the rip-off. The poorer you are the more they steal from you. I truly hate Tim Cook, not only because he raised the prices at a time where Apple needed it the least but also because he made despicable greedy corporate behavior the new norm. I guess he makes a lot of money, because only money matters in life...
I find it funny that there are still some people defending this behavior. The only way it doesn't affect you is if you are rich enough to buy the fully loaded version of their hardware and then it just become blaming peoples for being poor. An occupation a lot of Apple users like to engage in very often in my experience; in fact the meaner, incompetent but luckier they got in life, the better the correlation.
I am not sufficiently clear on the relationship between the total virtual allocation a particular service and how much physical ram is required to service that in practice. I don't think it's true that you can simply jump from the total allocation to physical memory numbers.
This is also not about cost - if it was, the upgrade would be what, 40 USD? The only reason for having an 8GB model at all is so they can make 16GB into a hefty upsell with a 100x markup - without it, the 16GB model would be the listed baseline and would have to be priced as such.
Presenting an almost suitable model with a much too pricey but within reach upgrade is a pretty standard trick to make someone commit to a higher price.
That's also why they carry older iPhones and iPads - not to sell those models, but to lure you with a low price, then convince you that you need more storage, then that storage is almost the price of the other model, which needs more storage... Up the ladder you go.
The worst part is that, this is priced like automobiles. Now you're going to upgrade the RAM, and it reaches the price of its sibling products. You'll be tempted to consider that product.
Prices listed in Euros:
MacBook Air 13 inch M2 8core cpu, 8core gpu
Entry level price: 1299.00
Cpu upgrade +120eu: 8core cpu, 10core gpu <- why does this exist? Solely to upsell you into the Pro level.
Ram upgrade +230eu: from 8gb to 16gb <- essential
Storage upgrade +230eu: from 256gb (pitiful) to 512gb (barely acceptable these days at this price)
Total: 1879,00
Now you're goin to start looking at other options from here.
From here, you realize.. the 14" macbook pro M3 laptop is priced at... 2029,00 It's a 150 euro upsell to get that nice space gray M3 laptop.
The specs? 8 core CPU, 10 core GPU, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD. You're now going to want to upgrade that RAM once you start to consider the Pro model.
That pushes the price to 2259,00! Which is shy of the M3 Pro version of the 14" Macbook Pro (at 2549,00 but now it has 18GB RAM which, you know. For 290 euros more, you can get 2GB more RAM and the M3 Pro).
It's just clever positioning of prices to scale the customer into spending the most possible amount and to generate FOMO.
But even more annoyingly, in the physical stores (even Apple ones) you're most likely to find only the base models
Orders for the custom models can take more than a week sometimes