New for the same price:
I was going to tell you how much I loved my 11" MBA - it pretty much went anywhere an iPad could go. It actually has a replaceable SSD and I did replace it with I think a 480GB at one point. However that overheated and stopped working, I had to return it and put the original one back in. So don’t be tempted to do that.
Interesting. I had tried upgrading the SSD in my 11" MBA with a 1TB model from OtherWorldComputing and also had issues. Not sure if it was overheating or what, but it failed twice and they replaced it twice. After the third failure they gave me store credit instead and I put back the original SSD.
This isn’t intended as an answer to your question in the sense that it’s not about something other than the M1 Air, but I went through something similar last year and thought I’d at least share my experience and what I did.
I was on the “wrong” side of the border in March of 2020 and for a few days it wasn’t clear to me whether or not I’d be getting back home as planned. I had always used an underpowered notebook as my travel computer and on that trip I had the 2019 Air and an 11" iPad Pro with me. These are fine for light duty, but suddenly and unexpectedly I was looking at possibly having to work for an extended period with devices that really struggle when pushed.
After that trip, I decided that I would always take something with me that could do duty as my primary computer, and when the M1 Air came out it was the obvious choice. I bought one and have had zero regrets over that decision.
My next trip (first one since the pandemic began) out of country is scheduled for mid-September, and while there are lots of things to be concerned over, having a capable computer with me is not one of them 
(I suspect that one of the lasting effects of the pandemic, for me, will be a tendency to over prepare for things like this.)
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That’s a good point. What with all the crazy in the last year or so, a lot of assumptions that we’d previously had about travel just don’t work anymore.
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