m1-terraform-provider-helper VS nixml

There's virtually no unsolved issue. If you need something x86 is you use rosetta. If you're using terraform and a provider hasn't issued an ARM release you can use the m1 provider helper.

There really isn't any substitute for production experience. Yes you can learn the basics, and the universals are transferable, but you're never going to come across e.g. something like needing this in a homelab, still less the real reasons why you need it...

Try this. https://github.com/kreuzwerker/m1-terraform-provider-helper

tfswitch might help with particular issue of terraform versioning:

https://tfswitch.warrensbox.com/

Even then some versions of terraform providers are not compatible with M1 macs. Docker would help with that probably, but so can: https://github.com/kreuzwerker/m1-terraform-provider-helper

Perhaps these sort of issues support the benefits of per-module docker images?

Check to see if your provider has an M1 compiled version https://github.com/kreuzwerker/m1-terraform-provider-helper/blob/main/docs/provider_information.md

The general availability of darwin_arm64 Terraform providers. There are often cases where the maintainers did not release a darwin_arm64 version yet. Only roughly a fourth of all providers have a darwin_arm64 version released (see here for details)

Some people are doing these kind of wrappers, for example: https://github.com/luispedro/nixml

Machine learning people usually use anaconda which is all sorts of mess... But honestly yeah, I think it's worthwhile to invest learning nix for simply guaranteeing your environment still works for years to come and isn't affected by side-effects (some package outside of your environment description actually is causing the thing to work, or some thing outside the environment is making the thing not work).