RAM is still RAM, the switch from crusty HDDs to fast NVMe SSDs may have helped to smooth things over when you spill into swap but it's not going to do miracles.
Says your rose-tinted marketing-loving glasses. Unified memory only means you lose some to graphics. Only your GPU wins this bargain, not your usual workloads.
Other workloads win because on Apple Silicon the GPU memoy remains accessible by the CPU so there only needs to be one copy of computed resources for the GPU to use.
