You must not be doing much else then.

My M1 8GB Air did great before Tahoe; even medium complexity Xcode projects ran fine on it with other apps running. Since I made the mistake of upgrading it to Tahoe, it’s too painful to work in those projects.

It used to feel way better, that's the issue.

Tahoe is a massive regression in my personal experience (16GB here). So many random bugs and menu bar pop-up slowdowns (how is the system menu bar this unresponsive?).

Spotlight has gotten so bad, I can literally count the time it takes between typing the app name and the result showing up in the dropdown. Ended up switching Spotlight to Tuna.

Exactly. 8 GB still seems plenty for lightweight work, even under Tahoe.

For general browsing and webapps and writing papers and watching Netflix and whatever, this is great.

How did you type this from the lock screen?