That's so extremely backwards in relation to everything else it's mind boggling. 16 gb being considered and priced at premium, where I had a single chrome tab eating 3gb easily few time's recently.
What about colima vm for docker? Intellij, gradle daemon, android studio, xcode, electron apps, android virtual device, slack, spring boot apps, iMovie, Davinci Resolve, python notebooks?
Do you use everything together? My opinion is that if you'd use any of that seriously you buy the device that let it run correctly. Opening a multi-module project in Android Studio that requires something like 6GB or ram for the index, then running it inside a 3GB emulator on an 8GB laptop is just asking for problem. Be mindful of your RAM usage and select the suitable amount for your use cases.