Earlier quoted context omitted.
So my sister does professional photography, and went from a 16GB MacBook Pro(2016) to an 8GB Air, and reports no decrease of productivity - quite the opposite, in her experience all Adobe programs run much faster, and the machine is quieter and lighter to boot. So yeah, I'm not sure - maybe the ram amount isn't as a big deal as people make it out to be. On the other hand I'm a C++ programer and my workstation has 128…
The sweet spot is 8GB for most people. I’d guess 80% 8GB/15% 16GB and 5% more. Even many types of developers are fine with 8. Apple collects a lot of metrics and I’m sure they know this well.
Flagship iPhones always have less ram than flagship androids, but match or exceed their performance.