@dansup Personally, facing a similar dilemma, I bought a m4 Mac mini with 24gb of ram (~1000 euro) and a thunderbolt enclosure with a 4tb SSD drive. In other words; gave up on having a Mac laptop (while awesome, storage/ram is too expensive) and instead also got a nice Linux laptop with 32gb of ram and 4tb internal storage.
The only Mac specific activity I have is editing video/audio, as far as development goes I use the same software on both Mac/linux; zig/odin/python with sublime text.