I use it for my Home Assistant setup and more. It still has headroom. No fan, very low power consumption. Not true Linux container stuff but pretty much everything works on it in this area.
I don't have my embedded macbook fully configured but gemini says I can get it to repower itself.
By repower I mean if the power goes out and then returns the machine needs to power on and boot.
I have a couple of older Chromebooks I use in rando locations (basement, shop, car, rv, boat etc). And they are great for that casual scene-specific use. Very much recommend and amazing what you can get for sub $50 easily.
One can create a gmail account like my-robots-73489@gmail.com to sync everything too without touching your main google account. Very handy.
[edit: one thing about the M1 is that it has native h.264 h.265 and prores hardware encoder decoders if you are doing video intake of multiple streams]