I generally find the opposite. Experts know how to deal with limited memory. They benefit from more but they understand the tradeoffs. Non-experts get all kinds of bad experiences not realizing the issue is their machine is underpowered.
Maybe 8GB ram is enough for your mom but know lots of non-techies suffering with underpowered machines.
> Non-experts get all kinds of bad experiences not realizing the issue is their machine is underpowered
As always, it depends on how the machine is being used. The encompasses both intent and habits.
Someone who will install ad-spam toolbars will chew through all the memory in the world. That doesn't change the fact that they're largely using their device to e-mail, read news and occasionally open a spreadsheet.
The people I've seen with underpowered machines, wait 5 minutes for them to boot since they are both slow (celeron) and low-mem (so swapping 10-15 times while booting). They they take minutes to launch apps (like open a spreadsheet).
It doesn't matter than they're only using their device to e-mail, read news, and occasionally open a spreadsheet. In fact, reading news is arguably a memory and perf hog. 100s of large images, plus video, etc... taxes any low-powered/low-memory machine. It's bad enough on a fast machine that doesn't slow down but is still covered in ads on the news page. But it's horryfing on an under-powered/under-memory machine.
swapping on an m4 with a midrange pcie 4.0 SSD is quite different from swapping on a celeron with a low-end SATA SSD or spinning rust, plus linux/unix/macos is generally much better with swapping sensibly than windows.
believe it or not, an 8GB macos device is generally quite usable even if it's swapping, as long as it's apple silicon family. yes, it's not going to save if you if your working set is more than 8GB and you need everything in the set, but chrome/firefox do not actually need the 32gb you are probably giving them.
Maybe 8GB ram is enough for your mom but know lots of non-techies suffering with underpowered machines.