This is exactly what I said in the last comment. "People in the know" is a statement that narrows down your audience to a select few groups that Apple narrowcasts to. You arbitrarily ignored the rest of the market as being unqualified to shop for themselves. We have the usage statistics that prove macOS is not a popular alternative to Windows or even Chromebooks. The vast majority of PC shoppers do not buy Macs.
You might call it "disingenuous" to ignore your cherry-picked audience, but I did acknowledge the niches that Apple caters to. You are the one that is unable to reconcile Apple's halo of quality with their mediocre sales performance and rejection by the market at-large. Macs make Apple less revenue than novelty devices like the iPad, and the iPhone blows it out of the water in terms of install base. Apple Silicon isn't even the highest-demand high-performance ARM chipset right now, Nvidia's Grace SOC is. And Grace sucks, but it's modular and scalable enough to replace Apple's discontinued Mac Pro niche.
Cut it however you want; M-series Apple Silicon is chopped liver even in the middle of a compute shortage. The HN echo chamber said that unified memory and AArch64 would irreversibly change the direction of PC design forever, but both of those features have been ignored by other OEMs for the past 7 years. Instead, Apple Silicon is starting to copy design characteristics of competing hardware like Nvidia's CUDA GPUs. So, maybe you shouldn't trust "people in the know" to give you an honest accounting of how Apple Silicon competes with the computers that most people are buying. Their subjective statements cannot be extrapolated into an objective metric.