All my personal Apple notebooks have had 8gb of RAM and I have never ran into a performance issue that made me regret going with 16. I have yet to use Docker on my M1, but it runs fine on my 2017 13" Pro.
Also, I'm not mentioning any performance issue. I'm saying that the kernel can write over 500GB a day. There was a post a few months ago about this wearing down SSDs quickly.
As mentioned in my comment, I bought it out of desperation, and was even lucky to find the 8GB option in stock, after calling around and driving around.
To provide more context, I was about to go to a much warmer part of my country, and my work laptop's fan instantly goes to 100% fan once I start using it, because the GPU inside it turns the fan on when its internal temp reaches 50C. When I'm in the city, the GPU's idle temp is ~45C, so I really needed to get an alternative.
This is not acceptable for a $2000+ machine.
Apple really skimps on RAM and my new iPhone can’t take a photo without purging every single other app.