Well, I for one made the latter switch - did not care about Apple before M1/M2 but the processors are so far ahead technically that I was willing to make the ecosystem switch. Having a high-performance laptop that will last a whole day of browsing and intellij development and also still can get the lead out when I need performance is a huge win, there is nothing comparable in the PC space for what I paid ($919 for a refurb 16/256 with mil discount). Unix on the desktop in some relatively sane and polished format is a huge win for engineering sanity and usability too.

And I’m not an exception, you can find other people right in this thread saying “I had macs 10 years ago, went to windows, and the m1 was compelling enough to give it another try”. And while Joe Public may not be interested in the nuances of hardware specifications, those are the exact sorts of people macos is marketed to in the first place. The “happy bubblewrap os” that you decry is very popular among non-techies, and the techies respect the hardware.

I would ask why it's conceptually shocking that a wide performance gap at extremely aggressive pricing (for M1 MBA) could lead people to consider the product who otherwise wouldn't have - but a lot of people simply deny that entirely, despite the very obvious improvements in performance (this thing cranks indexing Spring libraries in intellij or doing builds) and battery life that self-evidently could not occur without the claimed performance benefits. There is a weird Alternate Facts Bubble / Epistemic Closure thing going on with a lot of people where the facts don't agree with their preconceptions so they're rejected entirely.

And sure, if your software isn't Apple Silicon-aware then you have a problem, but that's much less of a problem than people think it is. And M1 is such a performant platform that over time it will drive migration and that will continue to become even less and less of an issue - it’s a fast enough platform that If You Build It They Will Come. And it is already an edge-case for the most part.

For docker/k8s, in particular, just set up your NAS as a host. If you’re doing a build, Socket 2011-3 stuff has dropped heavily, a 2697v3 is $55 and 32GB rdimms are $50 a pop, or you can just slap some ram into an old Ryzen desktop or something. It’s not expensive to build yourself a much beefier machine than you could ever put into a laptop, and I work from home so latency will never be a realistic issue. I’m happy to work with it on the dev side to get the ide and daily-driving responsiveness.

Its sort of like Linux on the desktop - yup, if you aren’t interested in occasional debugging, changing away from generic x86 ISAs maybe isn’t for you and you probably will be better off with windows and a beige box from Walmart. But there’s a lot there if you will work with it.

There just is this primal shriek among a lot of the tech community - no, apple can’t be good! no, there can’t be a way to utilize it effectively within power-user workflows!. Like, the classic “apple fanboy” is a well-remarked phenomenon but there is clearly a group of people who are looking for reasons to pan the hardware because they don’t like apple and will grasp whatever straws they can find. The performance is a lie, no software will run on it, my k8s containers are x86 and cannot possibly be rebuilt with arm, no I can’t run those containers on my NAS… they’re digging for reasons not to do it. And the Irrational Apple Hater contingent is actually seemingly much larger than the Irrational Apple Fanboy contingent - this whole M1 saga has revealed that a lot of people hold latent negative oppinions based on the branding that they just haven’t felt threatened enough to reveal. Supremacy is very comfortable, it’s when that supremacy gets challenged that people start getting ugly about it, and x86 and commodity laptop hardware has held a very comfortable supremacy for a long time.

And you do you, but your consent is not required, it’s a good experience and it’s good enough that people are going to continue refining it to make it work. People will just move on without your approval.