With Apple switching to ARMv8 releasing ARM builds of solc is increasingly important, especially linux ARM builds.

The reason for this is that if you use Docker with an ARM mac, you'll end up running your containers in an ARM-based Linux, so you can't run any native solc build.

In Mac the situation is different, you can still run x86_64 binaries using Rosetta2, and this process is 100% transparent.

Hardhat, and I guess all the other Node.js-based tools, automatically fallbacks to socjs, so it still works in ARM-based Docker containers. Other tools, like Brownie, probably break in that situation.