If you don't have enough ram no processor can save you. And if you aren't running out of ram adding more won't help. The m1 isn't magic and I'm sure it does some things slower than Intel and some things faster. Maybe for your workload or is slower. For the workloads I run (rails apps, postgres) the m1 has almost identical performance to the Intel i9, but is more efficient in terms of battery life.

Apple does aggressive page-out to swap space.

Some months ago a guy had bricked its own MacBook by running data analysis tools all the day every day, until the ssd finally gave up (and you can’t change that in a macbook pro, it’s soldered).

I'm using a base-spec M1 MacBook Air since a year or so now. I have a 4K external monitor attached most of the time, usually four windows in Safari with perhaps 100 tabs in total, Mail, a bunch of terminals, Slack, Signal and Telegram open. It's snappy all the time, and consistently feels much much faster than my previous laptop which was a maxed-out Intel 13" MacBook Pro.

The only thing that ever makes it sluggish is if I open VSCode with a large workspace. Even with all plugins disabled. No idea why. I just stopped using VSCode.

Safari might be the big difference here, and you only really have one Electron/Chromium app, Slack, and it's generally better than others about managing its resource usage.

Yup, I switched back to Safari because I noticed Firefox uses significantly more energy (battery lasts a few hours less when I'm out). So it's likely that it has an impact on responsiveness too.

They may feel snappy if you go 2G into swap. Not if you go 12G+. My normal stuff uses 20 G ram, and that's without any VMs on. No way that can run smooth on 8G physical ram.

This is where marketing hits reality.

There are no magical computers, just a great Reality Distortion Field that's still at work.