I was pretty much in the same boat recently. Pulled the trigger and got M4 MBP - no regrets, great machine! Blows Intel-based competition by far away, double the speed of my beefy desktop build from 5y ago. Yea, I wish it could run Linux, but Mac OS works very well as a hypervisor and I still do all my day-to-day work in a familiar environment in Linux VMs. With all the supply chain attacks lately, I don't usually dare to develop on baremetal host anymore anyway. Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42541508
In fact, it's even better than Linux as a VM desktop host - finally a reliable suspend on lid close, smooth graphics in VMs, easy context switching between VMs, no silly fiddling with virgl and GPU passthrough etc. It Just Works. I can even play almost all the Windows games I care about - and at totally acceptable frame rates despite x86/ARM translation layers and lack of discrete GPU.
In fact, it's even better than Linux as a VM desktop host - finally a reliable suspend on lid close, smooth graphics in VMs, easy context switching between VMs, no silly fiddling with virgl and GPU passthrough etc. It Just Works. I can even play almost all the Windows games I care about - and at totally acceptable frame rates despite x86/ARM translation layers and lack of discrete GPU.