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In real use, how bad is the slower ssd’s effect on the performance of the M2 MacBook Pro 16" base model?
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The real answer is that it depends on what real world workloads you're testing for. If your real world work is heavily disk based then it will have a bigger impact than if your workload is not disk based at all. And the likelihood of being heavily disk based is lower and lower the smaller your capacity needs are so it kinda makes sense for smaller capacity disks to be slower, not just from a technical perspective of how the disks works, but also just from a use case perspective.
If your work fits in RAM and you mainly operate on the data already in memory the disk speed will basically not matter at all
If your work fits in RAM and you mainly operate on the data already in memory the disk speed will basically not matter at all
The above response is good. I would add that it also depend on the number of processes you run and memory size If you run a number of heavy processes at the same time. Such as Rendering video and images at the same time on a small memory configuration. In that case you not only write the video and images to the disk, but will swap parts of the apps if the memory is too small further eating into the limited disk bandwidth.
If you often transfer large files and your usage/RAM config makes a lot of memory swap happen you are going to have a bad time. At some point you will notice it unless you are coming from a far inferior machine. The SSD will be the bottleneck that holds your M2 back. Admittedly, the machine will still perform admirably, but that's not the point. Even the M1 is a great machine. Even if you don't notice it due to your pattern of usage, you will always know that the machine could have been more, and that's very sad. 
But unless you get the highest spec model, it will always be true that "the machine could have been more"If you often transfer large files and your usage/RAM config makes a lot of memory swap happen you are going to have a bad time. At some point you will notice it unless you are coming from a far inferior machine. The SSD will be the bottleneck that holds your M2 back. Admittedly, the machine will still perform admirably, but that's not the point. Even the M1 is a great machine. Even if you don't notice it due to your pattern of usage, you will always know that the machine could have been more, and that's very sad.
There are very very very very few external drives that will compete with even the slowest internal Apple SSD. And a lot of the ones that outperform it in sequential tests lose to it in 4K random data.
I am drawn between buying a Mini, a MacBook Pro or both.
In case I decide to use a Mac+external storage as a SMB file server/NAS for backup and file sharing across different OS platforms (not necessarily need to run 24/7 for such usage, just occasionally), should I avoid the base model of the M2 Mini and/or M2 Pro MacBook Pro 16" due to the slower SSD?
In case I decide to use a Mac+external storage as a SMB file server/NAS for backup and file sharing across different OS platforms (not necessarily need to run 24/7 for such usage, just occasionally), should I avoid the base model of the M2 Mini and/or M2 Pro MacBook Pro 16" due to the slower SSD?
Even a 10G Ethernet connection is not nearly enough speed to saturate even the slow rest of apples current ssd offerings. If you pay out the wazoo for 25G switches and connection boards you’re getting close. But ultimately there’s no NAS connectivity option within any reasonable price realm where this makes any difference. Especially not since that sort of operation tends to be mostly sequential data.
Do you mean if I get a Mini+external drive only to use it as a SMB server and as a NAS to backup, the base model is sufficient because even the 256SSD is slower and may not handle swap/page well, it can still handle 10G transfer between two computers?
Yes. The smallest drive is faster than a 10G connection. Of course using an external drive is as well will be entirely dependant on that drive, but yes, the base 256GB SSD is faster than 10Gbps
Do you know if one uses an external SSD with new MacBook Pro or Air if everything can be stored on that external drive and if speed would be affected by much. For example can the app Wechat be installed on external drive location and run from there with no issues? Would Performance/speed be noticeable during day chats then?
So for booting, the new machines require the boot loader to exist on an internal drive, but that boatload can boot operating systems installed on external drives still. - Other than that you can generally have everything stored on an external volume though there are some things that will be required to be installed to the OS volume so if that is kept on the internal, things like kernel extensions still have to be installed to that drive. - But regular apps will live perfectly happily on external volumes
As for performance it will depend on the speed of the external drive and the use-case. If the OS is installed on the internal drive and you just keep the apps and such on the external it will also generally only be load times that are affected, swap will (unless otherwise manually configured) stay with the OS volume.
For something like a messaging app you will not notice a difference at all basically. Well, load times may be affected if you get a rather slow external drive, but probably minimally enough to not really matter if it's still an SSD.