I honestly think the "YMMV" holds true here. I wasn't as lucky as you. Had memory swaps with far less open and suspect it often had to do with Safari and or Firefox tabs open as being the biggest hogs of RAM. Everything else you posted seems to be spot on. I'm going to miss my M1 512/16 as I find channels today to put it up for sale.Depending your needs, the Mac mini M1 `ìs``powerful.... IF :
* You do not need powerful GPU (not my case), but suffisant for image editing with saying Pixelmator pro
* You do not need huge RAM. It's one of my casual problem. 16Go is Ok, but sometimes I've got memory pressure in yellow (but never red or intensive swap) ==> I use lots of apps open simultaneously including Xcode, VScode, assembler/disassembler, safari with 20+ tabs, mail, spotify, WhatsApp (but no VM and/or docker)
* You do not need many USB ports
* You do not need to plug more than 2 monitors
The big brother Studio Max has so far, been a charm for me and to date, has been very quiet. At this moment, I have only mail and Safari open (with 7 tabs) and the system quite happily surrenders over 8 gigs of RAM to these two apps.
Last - if I didn't have these memory challenges, I think this Mini M1 would have been with me for a long long time. It really is a marvel of design.