But RAM on the non-mac side is plentiful and relatively cheap. For the same cost of that base model 16GB Mac you can get a PC laptop with 64GBs of RAM and plenty of storage

With all that RAM and storage you can slap Linux on it and run Windows on a VM for that work software that doesn’t work under alternatives such as Wine

Or alternatively run a hackintosh-VM then you can have MacOS without supporting Apples user-hostile decisions