I use an M3 air for my personal machine which is used for c++ development and music production — it’s an excellent machine and I have yet to encounter a task that would require a MPB (at least for the type of work I am involved with).
I'm not exactly sure how I'd proceed to learn the MacOS/iOS internals, I'll have to look into it, but I don't think I need to run a VM, unless I hack the XNU kernel? QEMU does run on MacOS so I guess that's additional 4GB - 6GB of memory for the kernel?