Honestly 8GiB is not a problem at all on the m1. I personally use mine about as hard as I use my 2018 razer blade advanced with 64 gb of ram. The fast storage in the first Apple silicon laptops allow for swap so fast that it just doesn’t matter. (Swap being kind of like using your storage as ram for folks who don’t know) the only time I found myself wanting is when I was running any servers for hosting local games or for extra gpu capabilites while viewing large intricate sliced files in cura. I can’t speak much for m2 or m3 but m1 it was a solid option to go with the base considering you were getting the best speakers and some of the best build quality out of such a thin and battery efficient device.

I have the base M1 MacBook Pro, but I'm seriously considering eventually switching to a framework laptop with Linux if I ever get the chance. I love the processor and OS on this thing, but it feels like I'm hitting a wall with doing some of the more advanced stuff I want to do.