I agree.Your posts are conflating two separate issues here. One, are the base models adequate for many (most) home users? And the answer is yes, more than adequate. Two, are the upgrades overpriced? Again the answer is yes, very overpriced. So I’m glad they offer the existing $699 base model, but I absolutely think a 16 GB / 1 TB model should not be twice the price of that base model.
I attempted to get away with a base model (prior to the M1 release) for my son for school, because base model user for sure, right?
Well, no, because once you add 2 user accounts that are logged in to iCloud, goodbye storage. Even with optimize everything turned on and hardly ever using the admin account, I had to remove it and make my son the admin of his own machine, because storage would just grind to zero. iCloud Drive is designed to upsell storage, in my bitter opinion, because it uses too much local storage.