This is interesting to hear and the answer to my observation may be the way in which the new M1 SOC Macs utilize memory. I am running Catalina on a late 2014 27" iMac with 16 GB of RAM. As I type this 9 GB of memory are in use with only 5 running apps showing in the Dock. However, Dropbox and the Music app are using just under 1 GB according to Activity Monitor (about 95% of CPU is idle). Could I get by with "only" 8 GB?
It all depends on what applications you use and what you do with them. With all of the stuff I am typically running Activity monitor typically shows Memory Pressure at around 20% with >7GB App memory, just over 2GB Wired, ~1GB Compressed, ~5.5GB in cached files, and <700MB in swap files. System Monitor indicates the four low speed/power Cores running between <10 and up to 50% each. The four high speed/power cores mostly zero with one or two occasionally peaking at 75 to 80%.
So yes, the average user would probably be fine with 8GB of memory, 256GB storage might also be okay
UNLESS you are an app collector like me; or have a lot of pictures and/or tunes and eschew the use of iCloud and keep everything on the local drive at full resolution. (I only have 61GB free on a 512GB internal drive and virtually all of my tunes are on iCloud, I only keep "optimized" images locally, and my 250+GB database is on an external SSD.)
