It’s viable but you’ll spend a lot of time with memory compression/swap working hard. Not a great experience IMO. It's more complicated than that; if you look

It’s viable but you’ll spend a lot of time with memory compression/swap working hard. Not a great experience IMO. It's more complicated than that; if you look at the reviews and tests 8GB M1 machines, you'll see there were no issues like the ones you're mentioning. The pipeline between the unified RAM and the SSD is so fast, it's essentially a L3 cache as apposed to swap as in the way we traditionally think about it.