Eh. I bought a base model M1 Air on a whim because they were in stock, and I can count on one hand the times I wished for more RAM. I have a Kubernetes cluster at home I can run things in, which also hosts a Jupyter instance.
My next one I'll get 16G simply because those few times (namely, creating Kubernetes labs intended to be ran on Apple Silicon) were annoying to deal with. But for I would wager 90+% of their customer base, 8G is absolutely fine. I've never once had it stutter with heavy Chrome usage, video streaming, or even gaming (not AAA titles, granted) out to an external monitor.
I have the 8GB M1 mini, which I bought as soon as it went on sale, so it's a year and a half old. In general the 8GB thing has been fine, and the notion that it can swap pretty quickly has been fine, but it's definitely noticeable now that the swapping is no longer fine, whether because the flash is wearing out or because there was a software update. These days I regularly reboot the thing just to clear the decks after the machine comes to a crawl. And I don't do anything stressful with it. VS Code, Chrome, and Terminal at the same time is about as extreme as it gets. All the real work is happening on adjacent Linux box.
I can't imagine the SSD having worn out yet; that's very odd. Mine hasn't quite hit a year yet, so I'll definitely keep an eye on it, but I haven't noticed any slowdowns.
Excessive swapping due to ram pressure can wear out an SSD pretty fast.
They pay like $40 for the difference, while making it a $200 upgrade, same with the SSD. - Especially since the SSD is apparently really slow with the 256G model.