Let me ensure I understand you.

Running a node.js server on Tahoe makes your macbook sluggish and you feel like Tahoe is fine performance wise?

May I reminded you that 10 years ago people also ran chrome and node js webservers and this was not a problem in any way with 8GB of ram.

> It chugs if I launch a node server yes but that's an outlying use case for an 8gb air.

May I ask if you have many 3rd party apps installed? What apps do you usually keep open at a time? Because 8GB should be more than fine for a node server.

Is it an Apple Silicon Air, or an older Intel model?

What are you doing in your node server? That shouldn't take up a ton of RAM.