MacBook Air M3 crashes due to insufficient application memory

Most web browsers utilize much more memory than people realize, but the Chromium based browsers are the worst (especially Google Chrome itself). You just need to better monitor the memory usage so that you start closing apps when you notice the Memory Pressure graph in Activity Monitor is in the yellow. Once the Memory Pressure graph reaches the red, you will start encountering performance issues and the "low memory" issue which macOS is currently handling very poorly.

I suggest you report the "Low Memory" issues for Tahoe using the Apple feedback link since Apple won't know about the issue unless enough people report it:

Feedback - macOS - Apple

If you have an MS365 subscription, I have found that the App Store versions of the Office apps are far more stable and much simpler to update than those installed directly from Microsoft.

I have an M3 iMac and an M4 MBA. The iMac only has 8GB of RAM and I've never had an issue like this with heavy use.

I do NOT use either Comet or Chrome, however. I use Safari for my personal web surfing and Edge for work related things.

I don't know. I had this happen to my browser twice now since I upgraded to Tahoe a couple of weeks ago (both times said it was using 70GB of RAM). Previously I only had encountered a couple of low memory situations with Ventura, but it did not show that extreme amount of RAM, plus I could easily quit the app & relaunch it without any issues, but with Tahoe that doesn't work....I need to reboot the laptop. I have a very simple configuration with just a handful of standard third party apps installed for my job. In fact I was not noticing any performance issues until Tahoe popped up the Memory Low Force Quit box....I could not Force Quit anything the 2nd time it occurred.

It does seem odd that almost anyone who mentions this memory issue is showing an app utilizing about 60GB - 70GB of RAM. I have always disliked the newer macOS memory management since it doesn't seem to recover very well if a low memory situation occurs (even before Tahoe). I have noticed Apple changing the memory management behavior between Catalina and Big Sur/Ventura, and now Tahoe. I think Apple is just waiting too long to alert to a memory low issue in Tahoe ( even to a lesser extent Ventura). At least on Ventura I can tell when memory is becoming a problem, but not on Tahoe....so something has changed.

Also, I completely agree with @KiltedTim regarding CMM. It seems half of the forum posts for Macs are due to issues with CMM or similar apps (anti-virus apps, cleaning/optimizer apps, third party security software). I must say CMM has a great marketing team.

CleanMyMac is complete garbage. Avoid it at all costs.

I would suspect a memory leak in Comet or Chrome.

What version of Office are you running?