Yes and no, depends on what you play.

I've been semi-lightweight gaming on my M1 MacBook Pro with some level of success...

Games that are optimised to run on Apple Silicon natively mostly run great (No Man's Sky easily pushes 120FPS at "almost-maxed-out" settings at native resolution and looks amazing on the built-in display).

Games running in rosetta also work well. The performance hit of Rosetta is only a couple percent.

Less demanding games such as Minecraft, Factorio, various MMOs, etc. will all run very well.

For Windows-only games, Parallels works shockingly well. I can run Skyrim with 3rd party shaders at 60 FPS without any issues in Parallels.

There is no 1st party support for SteamVR. You can supposedly get it working with some older Vive models. I couldn't get my Quest 2 working, even in Parallels. Some games with aggressive (rootkit) Anti-Cheats will probably also not work.

No. Game compatibility is still a big issue for many AAA titles, and the GPU is still not nearly as powerful as a dedicated graphics card from NVIDIA or AMD.

However, this is a fantastic general purpose machine for things like light web browsing, text editing, coding, etc.

Depends on what you play. It can probably play most games already. For high-end graphics, you would need GeForce Now (which works on M series Macs flawlessly btw).

Not really.

Most games are still released for Windows + x86 (AMD/Intel).

Proton on Linux works wonders on AMD/Intel CPUs, but your best bet is still Windows.