1) most of the team is on MBP 16 inch models. I know there is one and may be two on 13 inch models.

2 and 3 I’ll answer to the “best of my knowledge” but on the professional level it’s something my team doesn’t handle (I do wish I knew more!). Features get merged to dev/stage/main and trigger blue-green rolling deploys based on whatever is configured. The deploy is handled through AWS CodeDeploy (not my choice, also not my teams jurisdiction) which handles ticket validation/testing/deploying to whatever k8s cluster/manual deployment rollover if needed.

I believe you can build ARM images from Docker, or at least I have a vague recollection of doing so for a Raspberry Pi, on a normal x86 machine