I agree with the prevailing sentiment that 8 != 16 and saying it is, is kind of stupid.
However. An 8gb mac with Apple silicon does have higher subjective performance for lightweight office use than a standard 16gb windows machine. I personally would rather have an 8gb Macbook Air than a 16gb Lenovo.
Office use is actually where you are highly likely to have a lot of applications open at once (lots of web tabs, mail client, document editor, excel and maybe some PDF views) but do not need a whole lot of performance either in single thread (for blocking UI change/computations) of multithread for parallel tasks.
You just need to be able to load all the apps at once in RAM and let them sit there as long as possible. The actual computation needed for those workflows is pretty low once the apps are loaded. It's all a trickle of mini task depending on the user interaction. Sometimes you need to export/convert something, and it takes longer but it is not very problematic.
In fact, RAM is a pretty big determining factor in your experience, especially if you use the office suite or google tools. Apples knows this, and it is exactly why they sell such a low amount of RAM at entry level. They want people to pay up or use their (inferior) tools.
Their entry level MacBook are a terrible choice for office, in fact you are unlikely to either need or use all the computer power they sell in the marketing, but you are highly likely to feel the pain of too little RAM with the relentless message asking to close some apps.
The fact they came out to justify their choice is just the hammer driving the nail. It is all expected behavior from the greediest corporation on earth...
However. An 8gb mac with Apple silicon does have higher subjective performance for lightweight office use than a standard 16gb windows machine. I personally would rather have an 8gb Macbook Air than a 16gb Lenovo.