Even better is a Mac laptop with a desktop/cloud machine under your desk you can SSH into, which is what I personally do personally. Fast fiber connection with IPv6 and/or Wireguard helps. If you're using VSCode and Zed both have remote editing function over SSH too.
Everything has trade-offs. The baseline in this subthread was not bare metal Linux but WSL, which has the same exact issues. It might not give you the full RAM, but it should be smooth and the network should work.
I'd compare WSL to my older Intel MBP's setup, a VirtualBox VM. Both are subject to the RAM splitting and lacking GPU support, but at least things are simple and predictable on the CPU side, no emulation.
There's no "emulation" unless you specifically need to run x86 code. If your baseline is VirtualBox x86 on x86, the direct comparison, arm64 virtualized Linux experience on M1, is better than VirtualBox for sure.
Everything has trade-offs. The baseline in this subthread was not bare metal Linux but WSL, which has the same exact issues. It might not give you the full RAM, but it should be smooth and the network should work.