I had to check because I'd genuinely forgotten, but the Mac Mini I use all day only has 8 GB. Chrome, Slack, and Spotify are running on it 99.9% of the time, along with several other apps.

Not true, but good riddance if it was.

It's great to see that others have had better experiences than me. I had to upgrade from my M1 Air cause I kept on hitting issues. Note that I'm more on the power user side, and not on the typical light use side in my computer/software use cases day-to-day.

No. It doesn't. Mac OS runs fine for this with 8GB