I'm considering the purchase of one of the new Macbook M1's. Docker Desktop is apparently unworkable with their Rosetta 2 engine, and all of my development efforts rely on Docker desktop, and a local development environment that auto-reloads when files are changed.
I haven't done much with Docker remote hosts, but I see that this could be a stop-gap solution until Docker rewrites its engine. Google is failing me... can you keep files on your local machine synced up with your Docker remote host?
No, Docker doesn't do this. Instead, Docker packages your application code into an image; that image can be transferred to a repository (with Docker Hub being the most prominent option), and then run on the remote system, without necessarily needing to have the application code or the interpreter directly installed there. Beyond the image system, Docker has no direct ability to transfer or mount files from one system to another (you could do something like create an NFS-backed named volume, but you would need to run the NFS server yourself).
For day-to-day development, using your language's native isolation system often will work better than trying to simulate a local development environment using Docker. For Python, consider using a tool like Pipfile to create a virtual environment. Python is reasonably platform-independent, so you shouldn't notice any trouble using Apple silicon vs. Intel's.
Don't even consider using the Docker remote API. If you don't configure it perfectly, it's trivial to use it to root the host (and there are many instances of this in the wild). Even if it is configured, you can't use it to mount files from your local system (a docker run -v bind-mount option is always interpreted relative to the Docker host it runs on). If you need to work directly on the remote host for whatever reason, use an ordinary ssh connection.