On an M1 Mac I believe that rancher desktop (mentioned in a sibling thread) is the way to go if you are going the kubernetes route. Because I only have a really simple usecase and want something just like docker I've been using lima[1] which you can just install with homebrew and set up an alias and then pretend you're using docker. I have had some problems where in long-running processes with a lot of network usage in the container after a while I get some network timeouts. I'm not sure whether that's a problem with lima or qemu or what else might actually be causing it. But basically as a dev experience it works fine even on a pretty underpowered laptop (which is what I'm using it on in this case).
[1] https://medium.com/nttlabs/containerd-and-lima-39e0b64d2a59