I agree that the lack of backlight keyboard and touch ID isn't a serious limitation but 8 GB of ram would be probably be hardly usable, especially on tahoe.
For the target audience, they’d be none the wiser. If you’re even thinking about ram it’s not for you.
But won't it be slow and provide a bad experience?
I use an Air M2 8GB, and memory becomes an issues when I have Chrome with hundreds of tabs, a docker runner, an IDE, and several other apps like keynote all open. Add Claude and the machine is suffering!
My guess is that 8GB should be fine for most users, but design students for example may stumble upon issues if they use a lot of big apps concurrently.