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.