You've been told wrong; our goal is absolutely to catch up to Apple's hardware cadence and make Linux on Apple Silicon something people want to run as an alternative to macOS, well within the platform's support lifetime.
I think it's entirely doable, especially with the interest the platform has. There will always be things macOS does better, but there are also things Linux will do better.
Personally, I'll consider the project at success if we can match or exceed the features and stability of an average x86 laptop running Linux, with the performance and power efficiency advantages that Apple Silicon brings, which I think is totally possible.