I'm thinking that in the future, a lot of Mac (m-series) owners who don't keep regular backups are going to lose everything when their logic boards or drives fail. Similar to the failures of fusion drives we're seeing now.
That is true, however whenever you plug any external drive into a Mac Timemachine will ask you if you want to use it as a backup drive, and at least I have hammered into friend's brains to take backups regularly that it's become a running gag with some to ask me if my backup is up to date. Many people are aware that hardware can fail and just choose not to bother doing backups.
I "forced" a good friend to take a backup of their external drive and while it was finishing up they accidentally knocked the whole thing off the desk and that external drive (2.5 HDD) from that point on just clicked without spinning up. They got 90% of their data back and lost merely an hour of work (thankfully I used rsync) and ended up blaming me because none of this would have happened if it wasn't for creating the backup in the first place.
And another friend keeps their one year university project on a Mac with no backups - I replaced the old HDD for them with the most expensive non-qlc Samsung SSD I could find to give the data a better survival chance. But when I ask them to make a backup they laugh and literally refuse to.
At this point it's hard for me to emphasize with someone for losing their data, if you buy a computer you should at least research the basics and just googling "should i make backups" would do the trick.
Of course that does not excuse the repair-unfriendly Apple designs.
All the "security features" that Apple incorporates to "keep one's data secure" on the internal drive, are going to PREVENT data retrieval or recovery when there is a serious component failure.
If it was about security they could let you recover data and keep the security in place, it's not about that. Before M1 they had to put extra components on the logic board to handle the SSD, which meant more complexity as well as buying chips from third parties. Since the M1 they have moved all this into the M1 chip and the only thing left to solder on is the raw flash storage.
Apple does that because it has so many advantages for them, the entire logic for storing data is now in their control, both software and hardware required for the SSD to function is now made by Apple. This is part of what enables the insane SSD speeds on the Mac Studio and 14" and 16" Macbooks, the only limit is how many flash chips they can pack onto the logic board and how good their own implementation is.
And it's a cost-saving measure, not in terms of getting a worse product, but in terms of reducing the amount of components you need to pack onto the logic board.
If they "break"... they're non-fixable, "get a new one"...
But you had that same issue when you could still swap out memory and storage. I had logic boards of Macbooks 2007 and 2008 break due to the Nvidia defect, half a dozen times per device (!). A friend had a flexgate 2016 model (a too short display cable rips off the connector thus damaging the logic board and the display assembly) they had to bring in for repair, and so on.
How many dead Macbooks can be brought back to life just by swapping memory or the SSD? There will very often be a shorted component or blown capacitor on the logic board, or bad solder points like on those 2007 and 2008 models with the Nvidia graphics.
I would rather be able to swap out the SSD and the RAM, sure, I am not saying Apple shouldn't offer that or that I like their business practices. The point is that "if they break" it will still be "get a new one" because whether a manufacturing defect kills the logic board or liquid damage does the trick, that logic board is toast no matter what.
I don't run a repair shop or anything, so I can't claim to know the numbers, but it is my opinion that most Macs break due to a defect unrelated to storage or memory. When you look at what the worst issues with Macbooks were over the past years it was butterfly keyboards breaking, batteries swelling, staingate, flexgate, and some lesser known issues, for example the early 2015 13" models have a faulty component on the logic board that Apple to this day never offered a repair program for.
Not once have I ever seen a ssdgate or ramgate issue. Again, I don't say these components never fail, but if we take the case of the OP in this thread with his broken M1 Air, it's very likely that even with swappable ram and ssd he would still have to get the logic board replaced and "get a new one" would apply. Of course then he could rescue the data, which he can't now.