I help my dad when he has computer problems. His M1 8GB isn't even enough ram to edit 20-50MB photos from an SLR camera. At first I thought it was because he had a bunch of stuff running but it turns out all the rosetta translation and such stuffs the cache and combined with adobe creative suite background programs and all the mac os stuff leaves only ~2 GB of ram left for the photo editing program. And that's after the browser is closed.
You can say that it was my dad's mistake to buy an M1 8GB but I say it was pretty lame of Apple to sell a computer that expensive that can't do basic tasks. And don't even get me started on peripherals like external monitors.
I would blame Adobe. The Adobe suite is massive, and it sounds like it hasn't been ported to M1. So I'm not surprised that it doesn't perform well on the base model. In my experience, it has more than enough ram for web browsing, streaming, and developing, all at the same time.
Peripherals have been fine, except for monitors as you mentioned. I do think it's ridiculous that I can only have one external monitor when it's clearly able to support more than that. I can add a third monitor through my iPad or DisplayLink, but both of those methods breaks DRM video.
You can say that it was my dad's mistake to buy an M1 8GB but I say it was pretty lame of Apple to sell a computer that expensive that can't do basic tasks. And don't even get me started on peripherals like external monitors.