I must be doing something wrong then. I've got one of those measly models and I do quite a bit more than just basic browsing without any problem. Video calls are the least of that, and they work fine.
Modern machines also have a nefarious failure mode. It used to be that you needed more memory to cache the hard drive, but SSDs are pretty fast and that doesn't matter as much anymore. So now you have the opposite problem -- if you're out of memory and start swapping you don't notice as much, because SSDs are pretty fast. Except that now you're silently wearing out your SSD. Which in the Macs, is soldered.
Weird flex
Runs everything I throw at it development wise, while a good few other things are open and it has never felt slow. Compare that to any Windows laptops with the same spec and it would be chugging along with just Chrome open.
This is just FUD. Even my kids 2017 laptop doesn't "chug along with just Chrome open". It can run chrome and a game too just fine.
And there isn't a trend towards more Electron apps. Increasingly developers are using Tauri which is Rust based and extremely lightweight.
Electron Framework alone on macOS is 356MB.
And this is reflected in memory usage as well.
For the record, on my base M1 Air, I generally have Safari, Spotify, and Alacritty open at any given time. I can also run Docker Desktop if necessary, although I prefer colima since I don’t need any of the bloat.
(And with more and more Electron apps, might struggle even with that once you hop onto a video call.)