You really are in market for Apple laptop and 200 dollar more for extra 8GM RAM is arm and a leg for you?
I had a Macbook Pro 2015 with 256GB SSD. (Base model was 128GB). It was a very painful experience even back then. Yet almost ten years later, we are here, still paying $200 to upgrade to 512GB, when almost every Windows laptop comes with 512GB. FYI a 1TB NVMe gen 4 drive costs less than $100.