Speaking only of the Air here: The newer laptop feels thicker, since it doesn't have the nice tapered front. In general use, outside of only one external display in clamshell mode, the M1 feels similar. If you push things, like for video editing or rendering, the M2 or M3 are markedly better.

However, you quickly hit throttling if you push for more than a couple minutes at a time (like when you export in Handbrake, it will slow down and only run marginally faster than the M1, in my experience).

Someone should sell a little app for Mac that glows red when an upgrade would have been useful (e.g, when you maxed out your max Mac).

I suspect mine would be green almost all the time, even on this almost three year old M1 Max.