It not really an issue these days. In the days of hard drives, the system would use disk space as virtual memory. When real memory (let's call it RAM) wasn't enough to hold all the software and data you were operating on, it would write some of that to the hard disk and replace it with some info off the disk. i.e., you could use more memory than the amount of RAM you had by designating part of your hard disk as "virtual" as opposed to real memory. But because reading and writing to disk drives was much slower than reading and writing to RAM, virtual memory slowed things down. Along came solid state drives (SSD). Suddenly, as the cost of solid state memory came down, it was feasible to use SSDs for VM. These days, some operating systems treat the SSD as just a piece of memory that can be used for both VM and long term storage. i.e., integrated memory. Over time, it became possible to have some memory on the CPU chip itself. The on chip memory (called buffer or cache or Level 1 memory) could be accessed much faster than memory on separate chips. And because operating systems and chip design started to be able to anticipate what code was to be executed next, the system, could read the anticipated code into L1 memory and have it ready for execution without have to wait. Then we designed Level 2 memory which was off the CPU chip, but faster and more expensive than ordinary memory. Memory became cheaper and faster and we got to where we are today where there's just a single set of off chip memory that serves Both the functions of a disk drive and cache, with VM going to the integrated SSD memory.
The Apple silicon chips are particularly good at integrating buffer space and drive space onto a single set of off CPU memory. And Apple's current disk format scheme plays a big role in that by being able to address any location on the SSD without having to think about where it is on a spinning hard drive and wait for that part of the spinning disk surface to become under the read/write heads of the hard disk.
Now back to the question you've asked. I hope I've explained this well enough to show that in Apple's current design with Apple silicon and integrated memory, what we refer to as RAM and SSD are really one set of memory distributed among a number of chips. The only question then is your concern about "wear" of those memory chips. But given that "RAM", "VM", and "disk space" are all pretty much the same thing, the wear is effectively on the same set of hardware. And I assume the Apple operating systems can distribute the wear among the memory chips so they wear evenly.
In other words, I don't think we need to be much concerned with whether we have 8, 16, or 128GB of RAM. The terms we use are becoming a bit archaic given the current technology, and it leads to confusion. Over time I suspect those terms will fade out of every day use and be replaced by less confusing terminology.
Here's a caveat: It's not quite as simple as I've described, but I hope this allays your concern, and that you don't have to replace the machine you have until it no longer satisfies your needs.
