With everything Apple has delivered with their ARM processors though it seems like you can have your cake and eat it too with compute power, battery life, and a very nice laptop all at once.
There is no alternate timeline of this universe that would make a $1750 or $2000 laptop with 8gb of RAM ok with me in 2023. The prices are high and the upgrade costs for RAM are abusive. Of course, it doesn't use SODIMM modules so you can't upgrade the RAM yourself, you have to buy an even more obscenely priced model from apple.
That being said using thin clients with even less control than existing windows or mac computers have sounds terrible too.
Anectdata aside, you know your workflow better than I do so I won't tell you 8 GB should be enough. It definitely makes it less future proofed for sure.
It might be that every day (e.g. regular people) AI use cases don't scale much beyond 64GB of VRAM though in which case it's only a matter of time before laptops have such capabilities.
Still a lot of unknowns though.
Email, photos, notes, relationships, documents, professional work...every part of their life is already in the cloud.