Apple system developers definitely deserve a lot of credit for optimising ios / macOS Big Sur for its ARM hardware platform. If we could run another OS on it, it would be evident that part of the performance boost of Apple's M1 ARM processor is definitely due to the optimised software it runs.
I used an intel macbook pro with an older version of Mac Os that had lots of background processes and features disabled just to get the performance I wanted.
My M1 Air was noticeably faster even with spotlight indexing and a massive build inside a virtual machine out of the box.
The system software (OS) is highly optimised for M1 and thus greatly adds to its performance. Note that Apple has been developing ios / iPad OS on ARM platform for many years now.
