It depends on your use case. I got my mom the cheapest M1 Air and she loves it more than any other laptop she’s ever had. It’s good for browsing the web, watching videos, making documents, Zoom etc. And the battery life is incredible. 8GB ram is more than enough to do all this and more at the same time (at least on a MacBook).
The more expensive Air and Pro models with more powerful M chips will obviously be better at more demanding tasks - processing, editing, coding etc.
And none will be good for games, unless you shell out $4k to get 40 fps on medium settings.
What mine (m1 pro, 16gb ram, has fans) is good at:
Very low power usage and exceptionally long battery life
Screen is above and beyond what a laptop needs
generally fast and can manage cpu-heavy games and video transcoding
What it’s bad at
ever being able to upgrade
some functionality requires third-party apps or terminal knowledge
not all programs have an Apple silicon version and need the translation layer
virtualization is inconsistent and unpredictable
They’re cool devices. I’ve been a longtime laptop hater but I’m happy with mine. Yes you do need the 16gb ram upgrade that they will rip you off for. Get a pro model if you think you’ll need active cooling, but my fans rarely turn on.