M1 has indeed introduced some positive and negative things.

(+) Impressive performance while staying literally quiet and cool all the time. My MBP's fans kicked in only once—when using ffmpeg. This in itself has pushed the industry forward. We shall see what Intel and AMD have to offer soon.

(-) Apple is obviously, well, Apple. They broke some things that used to work perfectly (or things for which there used to be a workaround). Apple is pushing a vision for user experience, which tbh, is not always ideal, but I get that. For this vision, they sacrifice so many things along the way (see this for example: https://medium.com/@parttimeben/mac-it-just-works-horribly-c...).

Docker has been working well for me. But I agree that some changes (esp. M1) have made macOS feel a bit like Linux.

I work in fintech saas and yes this has been an issue; my 11 year old x220 felt faster than the m1 when working on our monolith and services written in asp.net core and the docker services it needs. For everything native, it’s really fast. You really need to be careful to have everything native. With .net 6 which has an m1 target things are so much better. Same for the jvm, android dev and react native. Xcode is still buggy but we only use the tooling anyway.

In short; it started out rocky, but, if you are careful and use only native application so Rosetta doesn’t kick in, it is a phenomenal machine (I have the air); great keyboard, touchpad and screen, great battery life and it stays cool throughout a development day.

If you need x86/64 binaries, then these laptops are not a good choice; wait until there are m1 arm targets.

They are far from catching up in power usage which is what matter for laptops. 5 hour battery life and loud fans does not seem like a very good price to pay for a hypothetically 10% faster cpu.