I was using a 2010 MBP (With upgraded SSD and 8gb RAM) until last year, it was able to handle the basic things We can do on a laptop and even has Windows 10 on it through Bootcamp. (Intel Mac's Best Feature lol.)

Then I decided to upgrade to a M1 MBA and I knew that the 8gb base model would easily fit my needs, since I only occasionally edit photos and videos, while mostly using it to surf the web. Ironically my Work issued laptop (Thinkbook with i5 11th gen with only 4 cores/8gb RAM) is even weaker than my M1 Macbook Air but it handles most of the multitasking I do on Excel and SAP just fine, but tbh 16gb is the sweet spot for Windows Machine.

If I was fine using 2010 MBP for basic use, then the M1 base model would be more than enough for Zoom, MS Teams, MS Office, Web Surfing Purposes since the M1 Chip is very capable chip. I'd say its the speediest machine I owned so far.