[photokandy]

Native Node is fine, and generally runs better than the equivalent MBP. My 8GB M1 handles Node & JS about twice as fast as my 16GB 15" Intel MBP from 2019.

Where you can run into issues is architecture support. I'm running Node natively, but this means that some packages that don't support ARM will fail to build properly. I've been able to work around/do without for now, but depending on your use case, it could be an issue, if you want to run Node natively. (I do not have a feel for Node via Rosetta 2 performance.)

[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.