The OS really has zero hesitation to swap to sometimes insane amounts and by the time you feel it in the UI responsiveness you might already be swapping 10-20GB

The OS really has zero hesitation to swap to sometimes insane amounts and by the time you feel it in the UI responsiveness you might already be swapping 10-20GB. 8GB is just too little for the base model. From what I've seen the OS alone will use 20-50% of that, and if I do anything productive with a couple applications and browser tabs I'm soon at 100% memory usage. Which can cause lags or short freezes when switching between applications. But on 16GB it's a very different experience, it gives decent breathing room. I think Apple really shot themselves in the foot with this, anyone using even half the CPU's potential is guaranteed to have significantly degraded performance and a worse experience.