I have an M1 air, which is the same chip as the mini, and I haven't hid a performance point for coding yet and that is with the air throtting after about 8 minutes on max CPU (something which the mini won't do, because it has a fan).
Of course if you do GPU intensive stuff, that might be an issue. Do keep in mind that the single core is not much faster on the studio, there are just more cores.
I mainly just keep everything open in screen on my server so I can pull it open on any machine. I usually just alt-tab between a browser (usually Opera) and my terminator. I can just as easily work on Dell Mini 9 (well the keyboard layout of extra keys sucks for most coding) as my desktop as my laptop.. I just can't do the screen -x and split the window up as nicely. But seeing as the Air has such a nice screen resolution and a full keyboard, I see no reason why it couldn't work.
As always depends on what you are doing. I have a 13" air (2011) and it just flys. I use it for programming (PHP,nginx,mysql,memcached,...) and some photoshop now and then (loads so fast I though at first that it was broken:)). The only issue I have with it is that some badly programmed flash on web sites will spin my fan like there's no tomorrow (really loud). Oh that happens when playing games too, but that seems reasonable to me. All in all this is the best computer I have owned or used (and I've never used OSX before).
The most surprizing thing was that I came from a 15,4" laptop to a 13" and I don't feel being cramped at all, I can work on my stuff easily, which I wasn't able to do on my old laptop. The resolution is just perfect (at least for me).
I picked up the new 2018 Air right after the redesign, 16gb and 512 ssd model. I have had no problems with xcode doing iOS dev (even using simulator on occasion), vscode and nodejs/redis/mysql working fine, also no problems running windows in parallels desktop, it’s super fast and quiet!
Great machine, only wish I had waited for the true tone and keyboard redesign but those are minor, have grown to love the keyboard.
Having read a bit more about the new M1 I really think it is designed and speced for the new Air. The RAM is on the package, which makes it very performant and 16G is a reasonable limit for an Air-like computer. The Mini got cheaper and more powerful, so it is not a bad trade off. I strongly assume, that there will be variations/successors to the M1 which are going to support more memory and also more IO (more USB-4 ports, more screens).
I have the base M2 air with 8gb ram, and it's really been perfect for working on. The only time things have become an issue is dual user accounts being logged in at the same time. Which is very preventable.
Just got a 13" Air (128gb SSD, 2gb RAM) and in my limited anecdotal experience it's noticeably peppier in everyday use than my Mini, which has a much faster CPU clock and twice the RAM. Cold startup is much faster, shutdowns are much faster, starting apps that used to be real pigs on my Mini (particularly Firefox and Gimp) is now much faster as well. Oh and file copies, of course. I haven't compared build performance, nor have I done apples-to-apples benchmarks. But overall, roughly speaking, it's a big step up in performance for many common scenarios.
Also Air 11" (2013). Been good. It's ok for coding as well if you doing simple stuff. Was rock solid with Mavericks but I was forced to upgrade to High Sierra and CalandarAgent went a bit nuts using 100% cpu.
I agree with the gist of your statement, but a if an Air is good enough for iOS development (and there are a few blog posts out there that say it is), then a baseline Mini will be fine.
Air only supports 1 monitor (without using a DisplayLink software and dock), but other than that, I can't see any tangible difference for most power users.
It’s worth noting that the Air only throttles about ~20% under load (and you have to push it pretty far to get there). It probably isn’t a dealbreaker unless you are using it as a desktop replacement.
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