It's a joke (clearly not a very good one) based on my experience that when Apple first offered only 8GB of RAM on the first ASi Macs, everyone's response was that Apple Silicon can simply store more data in the same amount of memory or something. Back when I used macOS on Intel, 16GB was relatively comfortable, but I can't imagine that switching to ARM would magically halve memory requirements.

(Yes, the Intel Mac had memory compression as well. And my Windows 11 PC also has memory compression, but only if you also enable swap because Microsoft says "fuck you".)