I see the lowball "base" model as a way to advertise the middle models, which is a common strategy. That being said, from what I gather, 8GB RAM on MacOS performs just fine except for truly professional users. Also keep in mind that it might have significantly more bandwidth than a typical DDR4/LPDDR5 8GB config. I couldn't find numbers for 8GB specifically, but 24GB on base M3 is 100GBps. If 8GB has the same controller, then it would be 2x-4x faster than non-Apple memory.