I have the cheapest M1 Air model for personal use and it's been great. Although I wouldn't have gotten it if my old XPS 13 (Intel i5 gen 8 I think) didn't have such a bad touchpad and a bad feeling keyboard compared to this.
One thing that I didn't see mentioned yet is that for Podman to work there is some fiddling required. At least when installed through Homebrew in a non-standard directory (my homebrew dir is under my user home), qemu just wasn't able to start the container VM and I had to find a way to install Podman with an older qemu version (pre-7.x) for it to work at all which involved downloading the homebrew formula and stabbing it with a fork
One thing that I didn't see mentioned yet is that for Podman to work there is some fiddling required. At least when installed through Homebrew in a non-standard directory (my homebrew dir is under my user home), qemu just wasn't able to start the container VM and I had to find a way to install Podman with an older qemu version (pre-7.x) for it to work at all which involved downloading the homebrew formula and stabbing it with a fork