On the ram front, I’ve heard it’s just a limitation of the a18 pro chipset, not Apple being stingy, as that chipset can only support up to 8gb of ram total.

Also, apparently the a18 pro is similar to the m1 in terms of performance, which the base m1 beat out the core i9 9880H, which was the processor of the most powerful MacBook Pro pre-Apple silicon, so the a18 pro would likely be able to do a lot more than light browsing and document editing, although the limiting factor is unfortunately the 8gb of ram that just can’t be expanded.