[iijj]

I have to the run all my node development in x86 emulation and it's the same speed (both subjectively and by timing) as my 6 year old mac I was replacing.

Things that rely on disk speed like npm install are much faster, though.

I tried upgrading some projects so they could run arm native, but it some cases it would have forced my colleagues to update their OS since such-and-such updated library dropped support for their OS version.

I briefly went down the path of having a patchwork of arm and x86 stuff running together (like having webpack be arm native but the rest of the project not) and it was lots of fiddling. If I wasn't careful to segregate x86 and arm into completely separate shell environments, I'd end up with ldd trying to link to shared libraries with the wrong arch during [brew, npm, bundle] install. It was more trouble than it was worth.