I've had an 8gb macbook Air m1, and it's honestly never been an issue even for dev stuff since my workloads just wouldn't run on my local machine anyway. It's much, much less of an issue than on my Windows laptop with 8gb of ram, too.

As for storage, yeah 240gb is probably not ideal for most people but since I bought the air mostly as a lightweight device I can carry anywhere instead of a workstation (even though it's insanely powerful for what it is) it does not really matter in my case.

(This is my first Mac so I was very worried of the pretty limited ram since I had no idea how macOS deals with memory, but if it's fine for me I'd say it's fine for most normal/casual users)

8GB RAM is fine as long as you don't try running multiple VMs or lots of docker containers. macOS is surprisingly good at dealing with limited RAM thanks to memory compression.

The small SSD is the bigger issue. If you use it as your main machine you will fill it up quickly and people then start doing stupid things like putting their Photos library on a USB stick or on an SD card, and that's just asking for trouble.

Why not just run your VMs / containers on a beefy, cheap, off-the-shelf Linux server that you connect to over WiFi 6? You could also keep all your photos there (and back them up with cheap cloud storage).

Keep your daily driver lean and cheap (and easy to replace).

Because most people don't (and probably can't) do this. The best option for most people is to simply have more local storage so that they never run out.

How long did it take you to check the 'Optimize Storage' box?

That's a somewhat recent addition, and it does help somewhat with the Photo library problem. It sucks if you don't have a fast internet connection, though. It also sucks if there's ever a problem with the photo library, because then you don't have a backup anymore.

Maybe 240GB are enough for light usage if you store photos in the cloud. I can only say that in my experience 1TB is the bare minimum if I don't want to spend half my time copying files around.

Optimize Storage has been there since like macOS 10.13 (2017). You're commenting about M1 machines released 2020.

Yeah, as I said, a somewhat recent addition. The problem with skimpy storage on base model Macs has been an issue for decades, and it has gotten worse since you can no longer upgrade with aftermarket parts.

"Optimize Storage" is a bandaid that helps make your Mac with too little storage usable. But it's not a great solution. You'll be looking at spinners a lot. It's just not a nice experience when every video you want to look at takes a few minutes to load.

These machines have several 40Gbps peripheral ports in the back.