Good question. After all the posts about the potential of Apple SSDs failing due to swapping here are a couple of large scale installations that haven't had a single such failure. Haven't seen any post reporting an Apple SSD failing due to swapping.
When an SSD fails, are you really able to say that it failed due to swapping? That seems like an argument you can't really make one way or the other unless you are a forensic data recovery specialist (which I'm guessing neither of us are).
Excessive swapping creates wear on your SSD. That much isn't up for debate. Enough wear on your SSD and your SSD will fail. That's also not up for debate. Whether your SSD will fail before you discard the Mac, that IS up for debate, but it's highly subjective. The fact of the matter is that the SSD isn't a separate module on these computers. There hasn't been a MacBook Pro where you could have a separate module for the SSD sold in the last three years and change.
Furthermore, this is the Macrumors.com forums, where the prevailing rationale is that the Apple doesn't make failure-prone products and that any media that says otherwise is click-bait sensationalism. Treating posts on here as gospel should be done carefully.
I would argue that the people looking to upgrade from a 16" Intel MBP likely wouldn't be looking at a MBA in the first place, much less a base model. I'm sure they exist, but they'd be very few and far between.
You can argue that all you want. That doesn't change the fact that Apple has been marketing Apple Silicon MacBook Airs as MacBook Airs that are capable of doing the kinds of work that you previously could only do on an Intel 16-inch MacBook Pro. You are going to have people doing prosumer grade tasks on these Macs because they do not want to spend more money on a MacBook Pro.
Yes, the kind of user that would be just as fine on a Chromebook will be just fine on any Apple Silicon MacBook Air with the base storage and RAM (whether M1 or M2).
That doesn't mean that excessive Swap isn't a bad thing.
That also doesn't mean that Apple using fewer NAND modules on the base M2 configuration results in a better SSD than its predecessor nor that anyone whose use cases are minimal will notice or care.
But your argument that only a handful of folks will buy the MacBook Air and intend to push it to its limits, especially after all the hubbub from both Apple and others about how capable an Apple Silicon MacBook Air is compared to its Intel predecessors, is based solely on antiquated marketing of Intel MacBook Airs that are long gone at this point.
