After years of incremental upgrades to the Airs, a new entry level M5 Air gives you double the RAM, double the storage, and double the CPU and GPU performance of an M1 Air.
Hopefully used Airs will come up for sale more frequently, as they remain a step up from the Neo.
My M1 Air display just failed on me after 5 and half years of daily 10-16 hours of use. Considered how non repairable some parts in MacBooks are I'd rather recommend people buy more expensive new one. E.g you can find very good offers on new M2 M3 etc.
I wouldn't recommend any hardware, let alone a more expensive version of something, if my experience with it was a catastrophic failure like that in early age.
