I also use an 8GB M1. It has firefox with many tabs & windows open in OSX and also a Linux VM in UTM which is running VSCode, vite, and another firefox with lots of tabs. It's performing well! (although swap is currently at 2.3GB, and there's a further 3.5GB of compressed data in RAM)

How much RAM should a few browser tabs and a spreadsheet use? Spreadsheets and webpages were both invented at a time when computers had orders of magnitude less ram than they do today. And yet, Excel and Netscape navigator still worked fine. It seems to me that bigger computers have caused chrome to use more memory.

If 16gb is considered to be a "bare minimum" for RAM, well, how much ram will all those programs use next year? Or in 10 years?

That doesn't help you right now, but 22gb is ridiculous for a few browser tabs and a spreadsheet.

This doesn't necessarily mean that your workload would perform unacceptably on an 8GB model. It just means that fewer optional things would be cached in RAM, more RAM pages would be compressed, and there'd be more swap usage.

Using Chrome I'd guess?