I have plenty of understanding of what virtual memory memory is. For one, virtual memory is orders of magnitude slower than physical RAM.

My point still stands, 8gb is fine if all you do is light web browsing and writing documents which is basically nothing, but at that point you don’t need a 2024 Macbook anything, you could use a older M1 Macbook and be perfectly happy.

All web browsers will use up as much ram as possible, that doesn’t mean they need it.

Even you don’t have a device with 8gb of memory, just because it’s usable doesn’t mean that’s it’s optimal, or that it’s not a ripoff to charge $200 for another 8gb.