My personal machine is a 16GB M1 Air. I never wish I had more horsepower. It's simply never an issue.

My work machine is a 16GB M1 Pro. Ditto. Really, I'd probably be fine on an M1 Air for that, too.

[EDIT] Yes I run local docker containers, though not with huge production datasets or for load testing or whatever—all that works fine. And, hell, they run faster than the shitty oversubscribed VMs our K8S cluster hands out anyway—I see way worse performance in prod.

[EDIT EDIT] Oh and I used to compile a fairly big C++ program on my Air pretty regularly, and use it to test/develop a big 3D application. Worked fine. Took a damn beefy server to compile that project much faster than my Air did.