In releasing the M3 with a base of 8Gb, Apple are clearly signaling that there's at least 5 cars of support for 8Gb RAM yet to come, so the question is whether 8Gb is enough for the individual use case rather than in principle.
That's pretty easy is most cases, since yes, it usually is. For example, I use my M1 MBA every day, usually Safari open with a few tabs, LibreOffice for documents, Mail for email, Quicktime for video playback, DOSBox-x for, well, DOS, and 4K video downloader for YouTube. The system doesn't show any signs of issues, memory is at about 80% use (it never falls below 60% because that's how macOS dynamic memory allocation works), and it only gets warm with extensive downloading.
I'd recommend 16Gb if doing a lot of work with other browsers such as Chrome, using multiple tabs, because these aren't always so good at memory management, and more RAM is also useful if coding or doing software development, or the like. Video production/editing is fine in 8Gb until you get into Final Cut Pro, when 16 is notably better.
Generally, a good rule of thumb is to buy the most RAM you can get in your budget, but as important is which applications you're going to use. Apple's mainstream apps almost always run happily in the base configuration models, but their 'pro' software and some 3rd-party apps can struggle a bit.
The only reason not to buy an M2 MBA is whether or not it suffers the bottleneck problem with a single SSD 'chip' over the M1 and M3 twin chips. Even that doesn't impact performance all that much, though it shows up as inferior disk read and write performance in benchmarks.
There will be discounts on the M3 models in places such as Amazon in due course, but there are already some good prices on M2 MBAs that are worth looking out for - even via Apple's refurb store.
