Doing VM workflows is one reason I didn't bother with recent Macbooks, as nice as they are. It is simply much cheaper to get a machine with removable RAM and then upgrade them later. Without going there, I can also build a decent ThinkPad T14 with 32GB for around $1,100 even though RAM is soldered.
I can't use IntelliJ or vscode with autocompletion on a 2023 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM with a bunch of my projects.
The same projects run like a breeze on a cheap and very crappy Beelink minipc with 16GB of RAM whose total cost is lower than a RAM upgrade on a MacBook Air.
That's surprising. (More developer anecdata: https://duncsand.medium.com/is-apples-cheapest-macbook-good-...)
Still, I'd absolutely recommend that devs and other creators spend the extra $200 for 16GB. And yes, it's outrageously priced in comparison to buying matched sticks for your PC.
Nowadays a Beelink SEi12 i7-12650H sells for around $550, and it ships with 32GB of RAM by default. Beelink is ultra crappy, but it goes to show how absurd is the $200 markup demanded by Apple to turn one of their laptops into a decent working machine.
I'm sure it varies with how large your projects are. To me the impact was serious enough to force me to shift my development work to a crappy minipc from Beelink.
On the same note, sublime will still win editor performance competition on Mac and probably all platforms.