I agree, I tried going the route of having a separate server to do my dev on, and it's a pain if anything with your network changes, and when you're not at home and connected over a VPN, then you're in a worse position than you would be compared to just spinning up a VPS.

I run Docker on my M1 Macbook Pro and have had no major issues running amd64 images using the M1 specific builds for Docker.