If 8 GB is ok for you, you don't need an M3 chip with tons of cores, either. You can just keep using your old laptop. Apple has kept the same base memory on these machines for a decade and now they are horribly unbalanced.
Really-very-performant 8G quad core Tiger Lake Chromebooks are sub-$300 now, actually. Moved to one (finally, after much delay and insistence that no-I-really-need-a-Linux-Thinkpad) for my everyday client and, other than a few old keybindings I can't get out of my muscle memory...
I miss nothing. It's great. And contra Windows or Linux laptop integration, it really does have an all-day battery.
I love my Chrome machines; they really are diamonds in the rough for simple tasks, and you can take them much further with the built-in Linux VM/environment.
If you're looking for a fairly cheap one, Lenovo *00e series has been good for me. EXCEPT for the 100e, that has a design flaw that makes it easy for pins to cross in the USB-C charging port, permanently bricking the device. So except for the 100e, that series is great.
Walmart's marketplace has a 500e listed for $92 right now, and it's also mostly compatible with all operatimg systems via Chrultrabook.
If you're at all interested in running other operating systems on a Chromebook, then I'd recommend checking out compatibility in the Chrultrabook docs [1]. Nearly all devices listed there are verified to support Linux, albeit many have issues, usually missing volume limiter support, camera support, or fingerprint reader support. And keep in mind that ARM CPUs are currently entirely unsupported.
Also, it's absolutely hilarious to me that some Chromebooks support macOS better than they support Windows or Linux. In the vast majority of cases, though, Linux has the best support.