I have a friend who is self-employed. He uses an iPhone and a MacBook Air. He only uses iMessage, Numbers, Safari and Apple Music for entertainment. He gets away with 8gb just fine and rarely has to reboot.
He probably could use a Chromebook or something even lighter, but the support and ecosystem were enough for him to pay the premium. His time is valuable to him so it was worth it to him.
My father and stepmother were full tilt into this quackery. Today they don’t talk about it as much, but they do talk about politics an awful lot. I’ll let you figure out where they fall on the political spectrum.