Since battery life is not specifically asked here, perhaps it'd be a good idea to widen the scope and ask these same questions to M1 Mac Mini users as well.
I'm one of those users (16GB RAM model), and desktop performance is phenomenal (no noise, superb dev experience, Docker Desktop is flawless and fast (as is K3s), Adobe CC is faster than on my i9 MBP). The only downside is that the battery performance is terrible (as soon as I unplug it, the machine turns off ;-).
Similar situation here; I try not to unplug mine :)
That being said the heat output is so low my mini lives in a drawer and serves to host time machine, a Jupiter notebook server, media server and a couple parallels VMs.
The fact that it just as easily serves up a display on my tv, iPad, Chromebook etc is extremely nice. It's been reliable enough to act like an appliance & fast enough that I never worry what else is running.
I'm one of those users (16GB RAM model), and desktop performance is phenomenal (no noise, superb dev experience, Docker Desktop is flawless and fast (as is K3s), Adobe CC is faster than on my i9 MBP). The only downside is that the battery performance is terrible (as soon as I unplug it, the machine turns off ;-).