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That's what I did, bought a used one with 64GB and a dent in the back for ~$1k a year back or so. Some of the best money i've ever spent.

Where would one look for ex-corporate MacBook pros?

At your own risk — one place is ebay sellers with a large number of positive reviews, (and not much negative), who are selling lots of the same type of MacBook pros. My assumption is they've got a bunch of corporate laptops to sell off.

Honestly the only Apple Silicon e-waste has been their 8GB models. And even those are still perfectly good for most people so long as they use Safari rather than Chrome.

Does Safari use less RAM?

Data maybe somewhat dated and I haven’t measured it myself but,

“Per his findings, Chrome used 290MB of RAM per open tab, while Safari only used 12MB of RAM per open tab.”

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/02/20/chrome-safari-ram-test/