X cores + X gigs of RAM does not mean better performance for higher values of X. That is the fundamental innovation of Apple Silicon, which people still struggle to grasp. The M1 upended how we think about CPU performance. It's not even a CPU, it's a unified memory architecture with hardware-level optimizations for macOS. You can't even cleanly compare the performance benefits of having memory and CPU on the same chip, because the time spent on copying operations is far less.
The plain fabulous joke is that we've spent 30 years thinking that increasing cores and increasing RAM is the only way to increase performance while the objective M1 benchmarks blow everything out of the water. The proof is in the pudding.
But we still live in a physical universe where there are voluminous things some of us need to put into ram. Things like big projects, application servers, database servers, IDEs, and for some of those - multiple instances of them. On top of that, browsers with tabs open, productivity tools. Can't benchmark out of that.
Apple have done things to mitigate a lack of RAM (consistently using the fastest SSDs they can with a controller integrated into their custom chips and now into the M1 presumably, memory compression, using very fast RAM in the new M1, etc.) but yeah at some point you just need more room. 16GB has been enough for me for a while thankfully.
You still have to try it out and see. I'd welcome an article detailing a dev setup where the M1 isn't suitable because of performance reasons. So far we've seen mostly praise.
The plain fabulous joke is that we've spent 30 years thinking that increasing cores and increasing RAM is the only way to increase performance while the objective M1 benchmarks blow everything out of the water. The proof is in the pudding.