I have a m1 air with 8GB of ram. I can’t say that I see any performance degradation so far, even though I have sensed that the last major update is impacting negatively the performance and battery life, this most likely is done on porpose to slowly make older devices obsolete.
This is the thing I hate the most, as companies know about this and abuse it to the maximum. RAM and storage chips are soldered on the motherboard and you pay 2x-4x times more to get decent ram and storage. For example I got my mac for 800$ (8GB ram, 256GB storage), the next option with 16GB of ram costs almost twice the price. At this point, upgrading the device every 2-3 years costs the same as getting a proper spec from the start.
