I have zero recent experience with MacOS or the M1,2,3 ARM hardware but I doubt even the very fast RAM is going to make that much difference to the above.
I can certainly get it to start swapping easily enough, so I don't necessarily agree with all of the people I've seen claiming that these machines are revolutionary and 8GB is the new 16GB, but it does seem to manage better than I would have expected.
Apple's pricing on memory and disk upgrades really aggravates me, though, and was a significant factor in deciding to switch to Linux for my primary computer.
For my kids and parents, the M1 Air has been flawless (even for me - it's my travel Mac). But if you know you're a heavy user definitely get more RAM.
Honestly, even 16GB isn't enough if you keep a modest (say, O(100)) number of tabs open. I regularly find my MBP slowed down due to "memory pressure" (swapping) at that point, with closing/restarting the browser to be an instantaneous fix.
And instead of everyone going "Apple, stop this" and creating change, they'd rather defend the $1T company by spouting "but the cloud".
