I've had an 8gb macbook Air m1, and it's honestly never been an issue even for dev stuff since my workloads just wouldn't run on my local machine anyway. It's much, much less of an issue than on my Windows laptop with 8gb of ram, too.
As for storage, yeah 240gb is probably not ideal for most people but since I bought the air mostly as a lightweight device I can carry anywhere instead of a workstation (even though it's insanely powerful for what it is) it does not really matter in my case.
(This is my first Mac so I was very worried of the pretty limited ram since I had no idea how macOS deals with memory, but if it's fine for me I'd say it's fine for most normal/casual users)
8GB RAM is fine as long as you don't try running multiple VMs or lots of docker containers. macOS is surprisingly good at dealing with limited RAM thanks to memory compression.
The small SSD is the bigger issue. If you use it as your main machine you will fill it up quickly and people then start doing stupid things like putting their Photos library on a USB stick or on an SD card, and that's just asking for trouble.
Why not just run your VMs / containers on a beefy, cheap, off-the-shelf Linux server that you connect to over WiFi 6? You could also keep all your photos there (and back them up with cheap cloud storage).
Keep your daily driver lean and cheap (and easy to replace).
Because most people don't (and probably can't) do this. The best option for most people is to simply have more local storage so that they never run out.
As for storage, yeah 240gb is probably not ideal for most people but since I bought the air mostly as a lightweight device I can carry anywhere instead of a workstation (even though it's insanely powerful for what it is) it does not really matter in my case.
(This is my first Mac so I was very worried of the pretty limited ram since I had no idea how macOS deals with memory, but if it's fine for me I'd say it's fine for most normal/casual users)