If you plan to keep your laptop a long time, I'd recommend ponying up for the i7. I'm using a four year old i7 unit, and it still outperforms many 2018 models.
If you are wanting a gaming machine without the gaming machine price, aside from the CPU just pay attention to the graphics subsystem and the current requirements of the games you want to play. Game developers are always pushing that envelope, but they also want customers, so if it will do today, it probably will still do for the expected lifetime of your machine. You can't really expect that with a business-class low performance machine with basic graphics.
You can save money by not opting for a SSD right away, although it does offer exceptional performance, it can also always be retro-fitted in the future. Choose the least amount of user-replaceable RAM as configured and then buy the biggest user-replaceable upgrade from a trusted 3rd party vendor with lifetime warranty to save the most money and get the best performance.
16GB is a nice point right now, but know that software developers (including OS developers) eat RAM like it was candy, because they are either jerks or want to offer the most advanced experience (you decide) so it won't be considered "extra" for long. Also only about 1% of web developers actually spend any effort whatsoever on optimizing code, so the norm tends to be just re-using code created by others, a lot of which isn't very lean, and it gets pretty bloated pretty fast. So RAM helps with surfing.