Feels like a refurb M1 Air is a much better deal.

8/256, TouchID, Magsafe, USB3 all for $300-350 currently.

Or step up to a refurb M4 Air with 16/256 and all the bells and whistles for $759. The New M4 Air with 16/256 were $749 for 2 months over Nov/Dec everywhere.

No Magsafe on the M1. The USB ports are actually Thunderbolt 3 but the target customer does not care about that or even knows what Thunderbolt is. I think the main upgrade is the A18 Pro is about 50% faster in single core and matches the M1 in multicore. Which is going to make everything feel a lot snappier for the kind of tasks they're targeting. Plus I think the $100 upgrade to double the storage space and get Touch ID is actually going to be pretty popular.

Macbook Nano will probably be supported with security updates for a lot longer.

Apple try to provide updates for a certain number of years after the model was originally released. The M1 Air was released many years ago now.

Average user doesn't know to look at refurb, the M1 Air will slowly drift out of manufacturing due to component sourcing etc.

Where can you buy these reliably?

The M4 does not have Apple’s groundbreaking memory integrity enforcement (MIE) whereas the CPU in this (the A18 Pro) does -- although it is possible that Apple decided against enabling it (to segment the market).