My Macbook Air M1 is almost 3 years old now. I think my Air runs fine, very well even. I've updated it to Sonoma, and I honestly have no issues with the speed.
At one point, Safari seemed quite slow but I discovered that I had too many adblock extensions installed. Got rid of a few of them and Safari is a lot speedier now. Some apps are slow but they tend to be apps that haven't been converted to support Apple Silicon yet but I'm very content with the way my Macbook Air is running.