I can for sure say it's 64 GB of RAM with M1 Max's large bandwidth. As a developer, it allows me to do all the multitasking, and run any VMs and Docker containers I want - without touching swap (at least for now). This makes everything work smoothly and flawlessly.

64 GB is something you can get only with M1 Max so the "cheapest" option here is 10 CPU + 24 GPU cores. For coding, the more CPU the better, but 32 GPU isn't really necessary. I picked this config for future reassurance plus any graphic/video editing/3d modeling I sometimes do on the side.

So, depending on what kind of development you do, I'd say M1 Max is worth it for upgrades in memory bandwidth and size. The 32 GPU option - not necessarily.