I'm not sure it's such a bad idea. You can take it too far of course.

I for one love passive cooling. I select my (no Apple hardware in my house) hardware for silent operation where possible. Started with selecting the right fans and sound proofing my desktop PCs back when and now I'm only buying laptops that do well with the cooling noise. Meaning, if all I do is browsing HN, you better not turn on any fans on me. And when a fan is turned on, it has to be silent and have the right "sound profile". There's just some noise that's very very irritating and the decibels are just one aspect of it.

So if someone does everything they can to do without active cooling, I support that. Now if they can't, put the right kind of fan in there, sure. E.g. on a GPU I'm fine with some cooling noise, but it better only happen when I'm likely not to notice because I'm loudly slaying aliens or something like that.

What are you talking about passive cooling? The machines in question were noisy as fuck when they got hot, due to fan noise.

The M1 Air seems to be a well liked machine.

Well liked yes, but it throttles due to overheating, though it will only typically be noticeable on long running tasks. Adding a simple thermal pad so it makes contact with bottom case cover makes a big improvement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EY7KW-PVy8

This is also the case with the M1 iMac, the lower model only has a single fan and throttles on long running tasks as well.

Apple is constantly having bad designs and failing to take care of customers until they are forced to via lawsuits.

I saw a Linus tech tips video where they made that mod, and they found that it heated the chassis well beyond the regulation limits, while Apple’s original design falls just within it.

It's taken them 20 years since the G4 Cube and several other no-fan, overheat-plagued models to figure it out.

Sad for all the customers along the way that suffered through all the failed attempts.