In one of those random “benchmark tests” online where someone opened several applications on an M1 Mac with 8GB RAM and did some work on those, they kept Activi

In one of those random “benchmark tests” online where someone opened several applications on an M1 Mac with 8GB RAM and did some work on those, they kept Activity Monitor open alongside and pointed to the increase in swap at some stage. So it seems like the swap is fast enough and is used more aggressively. That reduces the amount of RAM used at any point in time. The data in RAM has also benefited from compression in macOS for several years now.