You know what's really funny? The best web browser that I've used on my M1 Mac Mini, with eight gigs of RAM And the smallest hard drive that they offered because it was the cheapest model, Microsoft Edge. Safari is neigh unusable now, and I refuse to touch anything that Mozilla makes because they are a horrible, stupid company these days. But I use Microsoft Edge on my Windows PC and I use Microsoft Edge on my Mac and I have zero issues. It's not memory hungry. It's perfect. The only thing I change is in the advanced configuration to disable the curved inner edges or rounded edges or whatever it's called.
I use this computer all day with the web browser open all day. I play media in it all day through the web browser and nothing ever really goes to swap like maybe 200 megabytes throughout a week. I could open up VS Code just fine Or Xcode just fine and do stuff in that at the same time.
While people are debating if eight gigs is bad or good or 16 gigs is bad or good, I'm just gonna sit here saving money because I don't need to buy a new device.
Disable seri and spotlight while you're at it too BTW. That helps a ton.