There were none available in Canada with cellular when I looked a few years ago so I ended up buying an African-region Galaxy Tab A9 for $170. It's functional, but by God is it slow, and that's after adb-removing about 50 pieces of Samsung bloat.
Another alternative is the Lenovo Legion Tab TB321FU, 12GB RAM, 256GB, but this one costs 500 EUR.
But you are right, there are not a lot of alternatives with 8GB RAM out there. Most Android Tablets with a screen size of 8-9" have 4GB, which would make them slow.
This unfortunately looks to be basically the same as the A9 - the A11 is just lightly refreshed with a newer stock OS and higher refresh screen — the SoC and memory are the same.
It's the SoC that's really killing these tablets, the Helio G99 is about on par with the A10 Fusion from 2016.