[nefasti]

That's sad. 8GB should be more than enough for that workload. Sometimes I feel like we are regressing.

[eyelidlessness]

I would expect the workload as described to be fine on M1 Macs too (perhaps excepting Lightroom). If I had to guess, something in the background was adding memory pressure. For instance, I’ve seen the Spotlight background processes (mds, mds_stores) take over 16 GB. And those definitely work hard during the first run.