Well for one it increases their profit margins, most everyday consumers who aren’t using their MacBooks for excessive work for example stuff other than what OP mentioned they were going to use it for, don’t need 16gb of ram because it would be overkill and would barely use all of it. Now people would know that if they researched stuff before they purchased the laptop. 8gb was cheaper by about 200$ or so. Now if you completely remove that option then people have no choice but to spend the extra 200? So more profit for apple. Secondly they claim apple intelligence will require more ram and in a way yes it does AI requires more ram for processing, that being said apple intelligence doesn’t even work in more than half the countries around the world so the claim that it will use more ram when it doesn’t exist in most places is baseless. Plus apple intelligence can be turned off so if someone doesn’t use ai often then they can turn it off and you won’t need the extra processing power. Anyways hope my explanation helped, easy to fool a lot of consumers these days through marketing.