The argument isn't "same instruction set". The argument is "same development & deployment environment", by the logic of which the Apple argument fails because not many people deploy to Apple servers.

So you run a Linux VM, just as lots of Mac-using developers do today. But the instruction set of the VM has to match the instruction set of the host, unless you’re in the mood for slow emulation.

> So you run a Linux VM, just as lots of Mac-using developers do today

I hear far more make do with just homebrew.

> unless you’re in the mood for slow emulation

I run an embedded OS (made for a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 board) on both Real Hardware and on my ThinkPad (via systemd-nspawn & qemu-arm). I found (and confirmed via benchmarks) the latter to be much faster than the former — across all three of compute, memory, and disk access.

Apple is a small percentage of the laptop market.

But their market share with developers is much higher than in the general consumer market.

Possibly, it does seem that way for web dev at least. There's plenty of programmers out there (the majority?) not doing web dev and never touching Macs however. In a 20 year game development career I've never had cause to use a Mac for work purposes. Perhaps the share of developers using Macs as their primary development machines exceeds their 10% market share of laptops but I doubt it's a majority.