I had to check because I'd genuinely forgotten, but the Mac Mini I use all day only has 8 GB. Chrome, Slack, and Spotify are running on it 99.9% of the time, along with several other apps.

Not true, but good riddance if it was.

It's great to see that others have had better experiences than me. I had to upgrade from my M1 Air cause I kept on hitting issues. Note that I'm more on the power user side, and not on the typical light use side in my computer/software use cases day-to-day.

No. It doesn't. Mac OS runs fine for this with 8GB

Define fine. Tahoe, chrome, electron apps running with pretty much anything else already push things over 4gb when things start to get laggy and usability becomes more problematic, atleast to me. You could theoretically run a lot of things ‘fine’ the way you describe. And for the college student who hopefully doesn’t already run Spotify and Discord, it’ll hopefully be “fine”.

I just don’t get arguing that it’s the same experience as what people actually consider fine.

This is the cheapest MacBook available new - you are already compromising. Do you expect an economy car to outrun a Porsche?

I have an 8GB M2 as my primary laptop and I never experience noticeable lag on it, despite doing work on it a normal person would never do.