This right here. My work requires me to jump back to a Windows machine occasionally (but not for a good long while), and while I always appreciated the silence of the ARM MacBook Air - it's only in firing the windows box back up that I was hit with just how obnoxiously loud it was.
I've had to rip the dGPU out of the machine and cut the fan thresholds back to virtually nothing just to make the machine tolerable now. A lot of what Apple does is stuff you don't need, but it definitely spoils you.
Most laptops have the fan speeds set overly aggressive. I bought a Asus Zephyrus last year and by default the fan was coming on and off every few seconds, I tweaked the fan profile and boost policy so now it rarely comes on at all for regular day to day work. CPU temperatures stay under 55C.
There are M1 machines with fans, but you can rest assured they did the tuning so that you don't end up paying thousands for a machine with poorly thought out fan curves that don't incorporate basic hysteresis.
No. Apple just has their own poorly thought out fan curves just with different priorities. You can see this really easily on the Intel models where they don't even bother to turn on the fan until it hits something dumb like 90C. Quieter sure but I doubt good for long-term life of the hardware. It also had a negative impact on performance.
My M1 handily outperforms my old hot, loud Intel MBP, and the M1 doesn't even get warm to the touch doing the same workloads that would make the MBP turn into a jet engine. It's not just fan curves.
I've had to rip the dGPU out of the machine and cut the fan thresholds back to virtually nothing just to make the machine tolerable now. A lot of what Apple does is stuff you don't need, but it definitely spoils you.