macbook air M1 8GB for software development

Many Chrome tabs, a few instances of IntelliJ IDEA with up and running Spring Boot services, VS Code with Angular up and running, Postman, PostgreSQL server, Redis server, and a few Docker instances.

I am sure there are many of us working with these.

I am sure there are. Ask Ravi Yasas or one of his 46 followers.

The fact is that if Apple were able to accomplish what they did with anything Intel has to offer, I doubt they would have invested many billions of dollars developing their own CPU.

I really don't understand the point of your question.

None of my MBA M1 models have had any trouble playing videos or doing anything else.

The ASC Discussion you referred to is over a year old and lacks sufficient detail to determine what the problem may have been. Several significant macOS updates have been released during that time.

The primary question would be what type of software development are you doing or planning to do?

Does the final product need to be cross platform?

Are you doing development for desktop and laptop computers and mobile devices?

Or when you say software are you planning to do web development?

What programming language or languages do you intend to work with?

As far as problematic apps, many are not only problems just M1s but any macOS Monterey Macs and many of the developers are slow to address those issues on the Mac platform.

With that said, I have been using my M1 MacBook Air for embedded processor development with the STMicro STM32F7xx series with Free RTOS and currently Microsoft Azure Threads RTOS and its associated packages for network/web and file systems and Touch LCD graphics and the work with the M! MacBook Air even with just 8GB of RAM works very well. The work has also involved some web development with HTML and javascript and have seen little issue.

Well, I just need help from the community to decide me, if MBA M1 8GB

Is good enough according to the shared requirement or I must go for 16 GB.

The answer to that question is no. 8 GB is good enough.

What you must decide for yourself is whether "good enough" is "good enough" for your needs, for the life of that machine. The configuration you decide upon must be adequate to perform the work you described, as well as for future needs that are literally impossible for anyone to predict.

In the history of Macs I am unaware of even one report from anyone who wished they had purchased less memory than they did.

You should now have enough information to make your own decision.

"I am sure there are many of us working with these."

Then maybe your best bet as to seek assistance from user's groups dedicated to the product or products.