Discussion on: Apple Silicon for developers?

Being honest I'm enough old to ensure that the performance on Apple products never was a point of sale.
Never using the latest CPUs on the market, never using the fastest RAM, nor the best GPUs. Also not the best keyboards and for sure not the best batteries or IO connections count and diversification according to the industry standards.
I have never seen anyone buying an Apple product for performance (at least anyone on IT) for obvious reasons and for not sounding ridiculous.

They sell design. Not that kind of design that ensures good airflows and the best performance on a stock hardware, only looking good design.

The only reason for a developer using a Mac or MacBook is that this developer is coding iOS or MacOS Apps. If it's not your case, you lost money on your work tool because you can get much more performant laptop or desktop rig at the same price. More performance means you can use it for long time without being outdated and that you'll be able to work faster from the first minute of use.

Nowadays you can choose either having any Linux distro or using Windows + WSL2 if you need to use photoshop or any other non-Linux software for any unknown reason (still not understanding how there's people doing web designs using photoshop but that's a thing to discuss on another thread).

Now answering your question it will depend on your software entirely. If your code uses complex instruction sets it will probably run better over CISC architecture than on a RISC one (ARM), no matter if there's a translation layer or a built-in way to run them as RISC instruction sets, as you'll need much more clocks to compute the same result.
Of course there's much more about that, the electricity costs of a RISC should be noticeably less in comparison to a CISC -x64 architecture, or x86 if someone still uses that with its limitations-. The question would be if you prefer to save some money on electricity bill to run your code on RISC devices or you prefer to stay safe on a CISC one at its cost.
The future will be RISC for sure, at the end it's a much more modern technology and architecture, made for the market needs (smartphones) and can be extrapolated properly into computers and servers, but I think there's a long way to go before this could happen. You need intel, AMD and nvidia researching about that. OS developers working about that much harder and finally we, devs using that.

On a web dev point of view, we should be agnostic about the OS architecture behind our code unless you are doing something on high computation jobs and custom OS platform (which is usually a sysadmin job, not a developer one), as we'll run a part on a server interpreter/engine (usually) and other part on a browser interpreter.