macOS isn't the power user focused, extra high polish OS it was in Snow Leopard era, but it's still the best UX and energy management in operating systems out of the box
A vast library? With 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage you're not going to be running much, nor storing many files created by that library of software. Also, the only well-designed truly native software I have on my Mac, which I use daily, I can count on one hand. The vast majority of the apps most people use outside of "Pro" video and image editing, are in a browser, or are Electron apps that are exactly the same on a Mac as they are on a Chromebook.
And those "media" people using Premiere or Final Cut would never buy a computer that maxes out at 512GB SSD.
This is a pretty Chromebook substitute, which is cool, but it's obvious Apple doesn't want it to compete with the rest of their computers which start at $1,099.
This machine is on-par with the "world breaking" top performance M1 laptops when they came out; now it is "insufficient".
I know there's a RAM shortage. But if RAM didn't matter, Apple wouldn't have stopped shipping 8GB configurations in the rest of their line. Starving these of RAM and storage is the way they've chosen to protect their fat margins of the MacBook Air. Which is fine. I just think these are best recommended only with a giant asterisk that they're for web tasks only, exactly like a Chromebook.
But then again I remember when 128 MB of RAM was simply unheard of largess; so huge that using much of it for anything but a RAM disk was hard to do (of course, I also had that problem back in the DOS era with 8MB).