Why is that a limit of the ARM architecture? Surely it's a limit of the M1 cores as designed by Apple.
Frequency limits are set by the desired TDP of the cores (generally trading lower TDP & hence power consumption against IPS), and the limits of the fabrication process (considering effects like quantum tunneling across very small silicon features).
I'm not aware of any frequency limitation in ARM that means you couldn't theoretically run it at the same speeds as other CPUs. They would just lose some of their advantages at these frequencies.
Update: here's a doc from ARM that mentiond 3.5GHz for their Cortex-X2 architecture -
https://community.arm.com/arm-commu...d-processors-blog/posts/first-armv9-cpu-cores
This was even mentioned several years ago in 2017:
https://wccftech.com/intel-arm-10nm-22nm-collaboration/