MacOS on ARM handles memory differently, try it you might like it.
They can only print so many M1max chips at a time, they want to sell them in a high margin machine. Give em a year and the M1max will trickle down to the mini.
The only sense in which this claim is true is that macOS on Arm uses a 16KiB page size, while macOS on Intel uses a 4KiB page size. This is actually less space efficient (more wasted RAM due to partially filled pages), although it has performance benefits (N CPU TLB entries cover 4x as much RAM).
If you needed 32GB RAM to avoid swapping on Intel hardware, you still do. There isn't anything which profoundly reduces memory use. Arm Mac hardware does tend to perform lots better while swapping than Intel, which fools some into thinking it is using less memory, but it isn't.
(The reasons for the better performance: one, Apple put in a hardware accelerator block for the memory compression feature which allows macOS to sometimes avoid swapping to disk, so light swapping which only invokes the compression-based pager is faster. And two, the SSD controllers integrated into Apple Silicon are sometimes much faster than the SSDs in the Intel Macs they replaced.)
I already use the 16 GB 13". And while your comment is correct for most consumer applications regarding memory compression, it may not work that well in numerical computing on Python or C++ e.g. where a lot of RNGs are used or 2D/3D arrays are juggled. Just clarifying. Your statement is mostly true - but not always. Having a higher RAM machine could help definitely.
If you have pro needs, step up to the pro machine. $2k is paltry in this inflationary environment. Will pay for itself in productivity forthwith.
Wow, you sure have given me a lot to think about.