My M3 Pro with 18gb of ram still feels like a beast. The only thing I can make it suffer with so far is generating meshes from 3D scanning, and even then I'm just patient. Apple is suffering from success with these older laptops, it's a tough sell to upgrade, even from the M1 Max folks.
I mean, they had to make them good because of the new cpu architecture, but since the emulation worked so well and overall adoption was really fast it now is a problem for them as a company. A really good problem to have though