One anecdotal data point - I have two systems that I routinely work with every day - My Dell XPS 7590 (16B) that runs Ubuntu 20.04 and my 8 GB MacBook air M1.

One anecdotal data point - I have two systems that I routinely work with every day - My Dell XPS 7590 (16B) that runs Ubuntu 20.04 and my 8 GB MacBook air M1. With just a moderate background app stack (terminal, libre, slack) My Ubuntu system routinely comes to a crashing halt at ~40 Chrome tabs, but the 8 GB MacOS system seemingly can handle > 75 Safari tabs without even noticing with a much heavier app stack loaded, including slack, terminal and microsoft excel (I rarely bother to even exit apps on my Mac - on my linux system I'm always trimming to get RSS down) The underlying operating system and applications (particularly the browser) make a huge difference. I always tell people that as long as they aren't doing AV editing or any type of numerical analysis on large matrices, VMs, etc... (and if they are, they already know they need more resources) that 8 GB on a Mac == 16 GB on a Linux system (It's actually far better based on my experience, but I like to be conservative). It is very much non intuitive, but the vast majority of people really don't need anything more than an 8GB Mac. The speedy SSD makes a big difference as well.