I've owned several Apple laptops over the last 20 years for both personal and work use and they've all had reduced battery life over time. I've suffered one recall, another one which failed 1 month past the warranty and which the Apple Store said was quite normal(!), and several had degraded to the point I had to ensure they didn't drop down to below 20% (or some other magic number). After the first few I took into the Apple Store only for them to say "oh that's to be expected" I stopped going in. Not sure why people think Apple laptops are magically immune, they're not. They suffer battery issues just the same as other brands do.

Yep. Apple battery health in system preferences will show you how much the battery has degraded since the device was new. My ~2yo M1 MacBook Pro still has 92% capacity compared to when it was brand new.

To an extent, there's a limit for air travel, generally speaking as they can be dangerous. The m1/m2 are just killer in terms of lifetime and usage for general reading/browsing/email.. and still very long for even content viewing. Most people aren't rapidly draining their batteries, so the longevity gets to be a bit better overall.

AMD is getting pretty close and the perf:watt on the coming generation(s) for laptops (including integrated gpu) look to be really impressive to say the least...

They can also implement better battery management technology (cooling, charge rate curves, keeping the charge between 10%-90% instead of 0-100%, but reporting 0-100% to the user via scaling), etc, etc.

For a good counter-example, look at the early Nissan Leafs. They burned out their batteries in a matter of a few years, but battery replacements for other brands from that time are basically unheard of. (The inherent information asymmetry for new car purchasers is one reason Biden's IRA dictated minimum car battery warranties.)