Interesting. I had the opposite experience. I had a 16GB M1, and once the RAM is exhausted it grinds to a halt - everything lags, including simple tasks like switching browser tabs, every now and then the spinning beach ball of death would come on. It was the worst experience I've had in a modern laptop.

Now I'm on a 64GB M1 Max and things are super snappy again. (Monterey on the other hand is buggy as hell, simple things like tap to click and pinch to zoom are broken. [1])

[1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/tap-to-click-issues-on-...