I used an 8GB M1 Air as primary device (Safari, Xcode, Simulator, VSCode etc) in 2021 and it mostly worked out. I preferred it over my beefy i9 MBP due to various reasons. Sometimes I had to kill apps if a memory challenging app ran in the simulator.

Maybe your argument applies when running Chrome (?), but I had no issues whatsoever running Safari, and not even using an ad blocker.