Much more often than not, for extended use, I see professional using an extended screen in which case the 13" screen isn't a problem. For 1-2 hours it's perfectly fine though, or for the length of a flight. I can sympathise with those needing a larger screen due to accessibility, but the difference between 13" and 16" isn't really that big, and I would not recommend a 16" either for extended use on its own.

I have to disagree on "good enough" not lasting long-term. Every Mac user with a 5-9 year old MacBook can refute that. Some apps use more memory than they used to but memory management has also gotten a lot better and we all use SSD for swapping. So if they, on their 8 year old Pro laptops can still do everything, a current Air can do exponentially more, so why would we wanna sell them a Pro? Additionally, a lot of what professionals use these days is actually heavy-lifting done on a server somewhere, in the cloud. I think the problem is that some professionals don't see anyone as being a professional unless they use use some crazy-resource intensive app. I think this is where many of the readers misunderstood the article, and perhaps that's my fault, but that is the message - that the Apple Silicon Airs are better than any previous Intel machines were and thus for the large majority it negates the need for a Pro machine going forward. That's the reason I didn't go into specs, because it's so blatantly obvious how powerful the M1 and M2 chips are.