I bought my gf an M3 pro with 8gb ram and text input in the browser is often slow as hell (Google Docs, Facebook Messenger, etc.). Takes a moment before a character appears after typing it. I've never owned a Mac myself so I believed Apple's marketing speak about 8gb being the 16gb on their platform (not to mention that the 16gb upgrade is ridiculously expensive) but boy are they wrong. Maybe in native applications their memory magic works but definitely not in a browser. She does some light React dev and it's been fine for that though (but not mind-blowing).
Yeah it sucks. I use an M1 8GB for work because at work we're not allowed to order CTO models :( We have to order through a reseller that refused to do this. It's very tough to work with (though I'm sure part of the reason is Microsoft's incompetence, their apps perform very poorly and a lot of them are electron crap now).
Apple saying the "our 8GB is equivalent to 16GB" is something they've always done. Even in the PowerPC days they were selling the "megaherz myth" as if their megahertzes were better than intel's.
Of course when they moved to intel Macs received a huge performance boost...
