Performance is not the problem. 8GB is simply not enough for running a virtualized environment and having anything significant going on in the host OS.
Single task stuff will work fine, but anything multi-threaded, memory hungry or heavy 3D graphics will quickly break down under load. And it’s not even 8GB with video RAM coming out of the same pool.
If you want to virtualize, get 16GB. Period.
All of that is true, but respectfully it misses the point, which is that you can do this
at all, on a $500/$600 macOS laptop with a phone processor in it (and not even the latest-generation phone processor). This is (almost certainly) the worst MacBook Neo they'll ever make in terms of performance, and it's still good enough to do things that comparably-priced x86 laptops can't do, with a better OS and better support (don't underestimate the value of just "take it to the Apple Store"). Now imagine next year's model with A19 Pro in it, with 12GB of RAM instead.
No, it's not meant to do a lot of the things described in the article and you'd be better off with MacBook Air or Pro, but it's still amazing that it can do them at all, or to be able to do them and it not be entirely unusable.
