I've seen lots of M1 benchmarks, but has anyone done a side by side comparison of what it is like to actually get work done on one?

Take a conventional dockerized local dev environment and just start building stuff. How much time do you spend working around M1 arch issues versus building your app?

This is the key factor that is keeping me from being an early adopter. I don't get paid to figure out how to work on a new chip architecture, in fact I pay a lot of money to not have to think about those problems at all.