SSD speeds have also increased. Prior swap space was incredibly slow, where as today it’s slower than ram but not always human noticeable for many tasks.
I’d be fine with my MacBooks 8gb of ram if there was a m.2 slot for storage
Even the 8gb machines will age out before the drives do in most cases.
An M1 could be the first machine that could have mainline support and work for the most part for over 10 years. Plenty have people have done that in the past but it wasn't a pleasant experience.
I’m not most people, I’m here! I would prefer a replaceable ssd.
So I modify my usage of the machine because I rather not kill the ssd. Rather than use it as I see fit and repair wear items.
But the keyboard is also a weakness but not essential like boot storage
The latency numbers have barely moved in a decade. And swap in operations are 100% a latency test, best reflected by qd=1 random 4k read (well 16k on a mac, but the point remains since the IOP numbers will be roughtly the same with a 4x larger bandwidth at 16k). It's rare to see an SSD that can even do 100MB/sec qd1 random read, and the numbers largely seem to be going backward as the number of bits being packed into each cell increases (ex MLC->QLC) on many products.
Bandwidth has always been easy, I had spinning RAID arrays that were faster than your average SSD 15 years ago if the only measure is bandwidth. This is why the xpoint disks were a big deal. 2-3x faster QD1 iops numbers.
This is the conventional wisdom around memory management and swapping yet in my experience a dead SSD in a Macbook is pretty uncommon. They seem to die of about 10 other things first, well into their useful lifespan, including physical wear and tear, worn out ports, etc.
Normal users with 8GB and power users with >= 16GB indeed have no SSD problems because they swap very infrequently
I can't really find it documented much at all. Conducting a web search reveals that 90% of the user documented concern around this has nothing to do with actual failures but "I'm worried about my SSD failing" or "Will your SSD fail?" discussion.
If it is rare, extremely specific, etc. then I think that bolsters the case that it doesn't make sense to increase base RAM out of that concern alone.