I got an M1 on loan while my Intel Mac was in the shop and I was terribly unimpressed. Only 8 GB of ram was part of the problem, but I just didn't notice any performance improvement between it and my Intel Mac.
I had the 16" Intel i9 MBP with 64Gb and recently got the new M1 Max with 64GB (had to wait almost two months after ordering) and it's not even close. I used to have to be quick about closing things in the back ground etc. Force closing things etc. Fans were always loud. New M1 I have NEVER heard the fans. It just works. And works well. No beach balls waiting. Just works.
My company gave me a i9 MBP for work, but I use my own personal M1 Macbook Air instead as it's so much better; no fan noise or smell of cooking thermal paste! Also and sites nicely under the 45" 4K QLED screen that I use as a main monitor.
I went from a 16" MacBook Pro with an i9 and 32 GB of RAM to the MacBook Air with 16 GB of RAM, and my build times at work were almost exactly the same. But the single-core speed makes everything _feel_ so much faster than the stupid slow i9 cores. (At less than half the price, and without a fan!)
In my opinion, the Air is the perfect addition to a heavy Linux/Windows workstation. You get the full spectrum from iOS development to gaming, albeit at the cost of having to babysit two or three operating systems. You can use the Air for meetings or conferences, because everything that's not a game has a macOS version (think Microsoft Teams etc.)
It's worth noting that if your workload is still on x86, it's running through Rosetta emulation and it's significantly slower. I've heard of a few people having similar "what's all the fuss about" to "wow this is great" transitions after their key applications get fully ported to ARM.
