>Let's be honest, an Intel Core 2 Duo would obviate most programmer workloads just fine.
That's absolutely not the case. At least for my workflows. My work-issued five year old Intel i5 XPS would get incredibly slow, and incredibly hot when running unit tests or compiling code in Angular. Goes without saying that a Core 2 Duo would be simply unusable.
My personal machine was a 2018 i5 MacBook Pro. On that machine I could open just one iOS Simulator or Android Emulator and expect to have merely decent performance. And by decent, I mean the system would be running hot, the fans would be loud and the system would be noticeably slower. Having multiple simulators or emulators open is simply not a thing this Intel notebook was willing to do. Meanwhile on my M1, I've ran six iOS Simulators / Android Emulators at once, and the system did not slow down, at all (for reasons discussed in this article).
In a futile attempt to push my M1 to its limits in a dev workflow, I even trained TensorFlow models on it. Surprise, surprise: not only was the model trained in a decent time (for a notebook without a dGPU; I wasn't expecting miracles), but it did all this without any perceptible slowdown in system performance. The absolute worse thing I could have said about the M1s performance here was that the MacBook Air's chassis got a little hot. And keep in mind that when I way a little hot, I mean that it still produced less heat than my Intel notebooks often produce when watching a 4K YouTube video (and it does this all without a fan!).
So in short, no, the Intel Core 2 Duo would absolutely not be fine for my programmer workloads. And, yes, the M1 has pretty much obviated Intel's lineup for my work. Dare I say, the M1 MacBook Air has been the single biggest quality-of-life upgrade I've had as a developer. It's the first notebook I've used where I've never been bottlenecked by system performance. It's a fantastic machine through and through.