I am a huge M1 fan but that statement is almost true, but not quite there yet. I have experimented with a number of prebuilt machines with AMD Ryzen 3600X/3700X, Intel i7-10700, and Apple M1. Those (esp 3700X) are often slightly ahead of M1 (esp in Rosetta) usually at slightly cheaper prices [often discounted too] compared to the base model Mac mini, admittedly at a much higher power consumption, noise, physical size. The delta increases quickly if you have to pay $200 more for only 8GB RAM (which is the max and sometimes the real bottleneck) and overpriced SSD. If you need Rosetta, you are still probably better off with a mid-range Ryzen PC, assuming you're not married to macOS.

I agree that it is at least super competitive on pricing with comparable compact HP/Dell/Lenovo 8-core desktops. This was surely not true before M1 (I'd say on the order of 2x improvement in mini price-performance).

I suspect this will remain true for a at least a little bit more since Ryzen 5xxx are beasts too, and once supply-demand gets more balanced, machine prices will likely come down at or slightly below Mac mini M1.

On the laptop side, however, M1 is glorious and way cheaper than performance-matching alternatives.