Apple

You remember incorrectly. The M1 review units were all 16GB. Apple has kept the real world benchmarks of their base models obfuscated for years. It's as simple as this. Sonoma and a tab of Safari consume upward of 7GB of RAM. That means under light use, 8GB models will have to swap constantly, slowing them down, heating them up, and wearing the SSD out exponentially faster. All of that goes away on 16GB.

This is also why Windows 11 is more performant on 8gb Intel models, but not necessarily 16gb.