Sad sign of the times.
Not long ago a mid-2010s Air with old i5 CPU and 8 GB was more than enough on macOS before the Apple Silicon era. 2015-2017 MBAir with 8 GB can run multiple browsers with numerous tabs (Chrome, 2-5 Firefox instances and iCab), MS Office and other things including video streaming with barely a noticeable blip.
So… ARM / Apple Silicon = bloatware?