I imagine memory will be quite constrained here for a lot of M1 systems.
Indeed, it is. 16GB is too constrained even for native Linux desktop environment.
And we used to run Vmware with Windows (on Linux) or Linux (on Windows) in 2005 just fine, on laptops with a couple GB at best...
Dozens of devs I know in a company I work with have 8GB Macs (and 2-3 years old at that), and run Vagrant and Docker with no issue. And those are mostly Airs with shared GPU too...
I think people with 32GB laptops hugely overestimate how many other devs also are on 32GB...