A refurbished Macbook Air M1 with 8GB of RAM (which works wonderfully for day to day stuff, even development with VS Code) is $849 directly from Apple. I never felt any slowdowns. The thing is chugging along nicely and I don't feel a need for an alternative any more. Apple Silicone has turned the industry upside down IMHO.
Yes, none of the Jetbrains IDE's seem to be usable on a 8GB Mac. It invariably starts throwing errors about running out of memory after a while and then everything starts to lag (including typing).
Also you can't really run any other process alongside as long as it uses above ~5000-1000mb (so no Node for instance). Having a browser with more than a few tabs open alongside is also an issue.
