I used an M1 Air with 16 GBs without issue for everything from Unity3D to multiple IntelliJ products without issue I did eventually move to an M1 Max MBP with

I used an M1 Air with 16 GBs without issue for everything from Unity3D to multiple IntelliJ products without issue I did eventually move to an M1 Max MBP with 64 GB of RAM, but that was mostly from severely underestimating the uselessness (for my purposes) of locally hosted LLMs: as you said, 24 GBs is plenty for most usecases