I haven't noticed any performance issues, and yeah I was purposefully stressing my machine. The attached memory stats screenshot in this reply is my normal usage (Excel, Word, Teams [Edge Based], Outlook, Mail, Calendar, WhatsApp, Messages).
When I was "stressing" my machine I had Parallels (M1 version) VM open with Windows 11 ARM and 8GB RAM assigned but it wasn't actually using more than 4GB RAM via Windows Task Manager.
I do see Control Center taking up more RAM than any of my apps currently open (also attached that), but I haven't really paid attention to memory leak bug because I wasn't experiencing any drops in performance at all.
Edit:
Interesting video between 16GB vs 32GB RAM on the new M1 Pro. Seems like I can bet the 16GB for the long run if I believe the SSD swap speeds won't degrade anytime this decade.