They get pretty expensive when you bump the ram and storage... I mean, it's less noticeable in today's market, but it was pretty rough... IIRC my M1 Air cost close to $3k with the extra memory, storage and 3 years of apple care, vs something like $1300 base price iirc. Similar for prior Macbook Pros I've had.

If you can get by with a base model, they've been an okay deal.. and as mentioned a lot of the build features, display, touchpad, etc. are top of the line, best in class. But before the Neo, I'd still often pick a Lenovo Ideapad or similar for ~$500 or so first, and still might for more ram/storage.

Mac is really good and the ram performance is generally better than slotted ram, so that helps a lot. It doesn't help, however if you want to run a VM/Docker or things that allocate/isolate memory usage away from native apps.

I haven't even had a system with less than 16gb ram since before 2009... I've used as much as 70gb of memory with certain workloads on my desktop (though usually not nearly that much), but it's nice to have if/when you do need it without thrashing the storage drive.

MacBooks are only expensive when you need performance upgrades, the base models are really not that bad for what you get.

But if you want to add a little more to your spec sheet, you might as well go somewhere else.