Safari routinely using 20+ Gb of memory with a handful of tabs open. Safari tabs refusing to close. Unresponsive System Settings window. Random application freezes and crashes, Apple Music not playing music. This is on a 32Gb M1 Max. My M1 Air on Sequoia doesn't experience any of these issues, even if it has half the unified memory.
Not necessarily, because I never used Apple apps, it's not like I'm avoiding them now because they're ostensibly buggy (as others don't seem to have the same issues in this thread).