Saying "8 gigs of RAM on Apple Silicon has been perfectly fine for the last several years for every day use" is a largely meaningless statement, since Mac RAM was at 128k 40 years ago and RAM demands have increased steadily ever since. That said, you are correct that the Mac OS will force reasonable single-simple-app operation under less than optimal RAM.
You are also probably correct that for "...most [simple] things the Air will probably perform nearly as fast as the Studio if I don’t have tons of apps open." [emphases mine] Many of us find having many apps open and instantly bouncing among them is essential to a modern workflow. Each of us decides how instantly things need to be based on our own creative workflow needs and constrained by finances.
We buy pricey Macs to compute with, and RAM is and always has been an essential part of how optimally any given Mac can compute. Personally I believe in investing in enough RAM when building any new box to ensure the expensive new computer can compute optimally for its life cycle without performing sub-optimally by routinely paging out to SSD.
That said, if one's usage is to sit on the couch and surf the web, an $800 8GB MBA will continue to suffice. Best probably w/o too many open tabs.
