If you are focused on arm infrastructure for linux, you can do a lot better than a Mac mini m1, they are limited to 16GB of RAM and booting Linux is experimental at best.
Yeah but without the outstanding performance of the M1 chip I then I might as well just buy non-ARM. Saying M1 is comparable with any run of the mill ARM based CPU is the understatement of the decade. I will look at how stable the port is.
Check out something like the solidrun honeycomb lx2 which can take 2 32G sodimms: https://shop.solid-run.com/product/SRLX216S00D00GE064H08CH/
Designed for linux out of the box, and you can even run VMware esxi for arm and go wild with vms.
https://flings.vmware.com/esxi-arm-edition