Which just has a bigger storage, but the performance is the same as in the cheapest one. There’s no point taking the most expensive option and try to invalidate the results because of it.

And yes, for development sub $1000 laptops are entry level.

16GB of RAM are the bear minimum in 2021

By simply upgrading the RAM from 8 to 16GB the MacBook Air cost goes up to € 1.389,00

Which is a lot to me for only 256GB of SSD storage