The 8GB M1 versions don't have enough RAM for a lot of dev work, doing pretty ordinary things created a lot of RAM pressure when I had one. I later bought Max with 64GB, and that has been brilliant. I gave up on the idea of using Docker almost immediately.

Early on there were major issues if you were targeting x86-64 systems code in C++. A lot of common tooling was broken for months on end. Time has solved some of these problems but ultimately I wrote code to support native ARM targets as first-class code citizens. There was a significant learning curve (I was not fluent in ARM64 ISA) but now that everything is ported, running native, and the tooling has finally started to catch up, it works pretty smoothly and I don't have much to complain about. The x86 emulation has limitations so native is the only way to go for many things, and you'll still want to test some code on real x86 server hardware.

That said, the latest OS on (at least) the M1 is noticeably buggy. Lots of behavioral artifacts that I wouldn't expect. Not sure if it is the hardware or the software, or both. Nothing catastrophic, just annoying.