My understanding from benchmarks is that M1 and M2 have an excellent performance / energy consumption ratio. But in terms of raw performance, many Intel and AMD options can still deliver more. Another very interesting aspect of Apple's CPUs is that they offer a lot more performance than the competition for entry models. I cannot find anything that matches a Mac Mini M2. Sadly, Asahi does not support the M2 yet.

Regarding the Mac Studio, I had heard complaints about noisy fans. Can you comment on that?

I have never once heard the fans in my Mac Studio

Personally, I've never heard them. It's dead silent and i'm constantly running CPU intensive build pipelines and heavy CPU bound sql queries on it.

I love mine too