I feel like this claim was made largely by nontechnical YouTube influencers and some Mac fanatics talking about how fast the swap on the SSDs is and equating that to not needing more RAM.

I don’t think it’s a wholly unfair assessment. You can get away with more when the memory management stack is smart and fast, but in the end if you need 9gb of ram and only have 8gb you’re going to know it. Most people just don’t (at one time).