Magento 2.4 Local Setup for Plugin Development?

Hi guys. I’m a little desperate as PHP and Magento is not my strongest suit but is currently required as part of my R&D work. I have dabbled with extension development last year for Magento 2.3 (? if my memory serves me correct) and I was able to install Magento 2.3 on my local machine.

However, I have read that 2.4 deprecated several search engines and is now requiring me to setup ElasticSearch by default. When I tried this, I noticed that my machine’s resource usage just shot up. I can barely use my machine for any other work.

Any tips on what your setup is like? Below are the specs of my machine at the moment.

• 12GB RAM
• Intel Core i7
• 512GB SSD / 1TB HDD

Thanks.