I don't know exactly what I'm going to upgrade to, likely M3 generation, perhaps I could push it to M4. What I do know is that I'll receive a massive boost in performance and features whenever I do finally replace it.
What benchmarks don‘t show is how well macOS works in conjunction with Apple Silicon. With the efficiency cores focusing on background tasks this leaves the performance cores to do anything you want to do right now. Everything just feels smoother independent of the peak performance.
Before I switched to Apple (with a PowerMac G5), I was using BeOS on a PC. I believe BeOS was using a scheduler that interrupted processes much more often. It probably hurt the peak performance of certain applications, but working with it just felt smoother.
This is something that is hard it express in numbers, but the computer just feels faster, even if a benchmark tells you that it isn‘t.
At work I‘m using a Windows PC that is objectively slightly faster than my M1, but sometimes when I‘m typing an e-mail in Outlook, it just seems to freeze and none of the typed characters show up. I often wonder if the USB keyboard is the issue, but when I switch to a standard editor the keyboard works just fine.
Benchmarks are a limited option to show the performance of a system, but what counts for me is how fast it actually feels when I‘m using it.
A (not so slight) tangent here:
Of course there are tricks to give you an impression that something is done.
With the applications bouncing in the Dock, you just know that it is being started (not that you‘ll see much bouncing icons with Apple Silicon). In Windows I often don‘t know if it recognized the click or if I should click again, because there often is no proper feedback that the task I want to be performed has been started.
Some form of feedback is important for the user. I once worked on a floppy emulator, i.e. a piece of hardware that replaces a floppy drive but uses USB flash drives for the disk images. What we noticed is that we probably should have added something to emit the tack-tack-tack sound of the head moving from track to track, because the totally silent operation just felt slower than a real floppy drive, although the measured time was exactly the same. There just wasn‘t any feedback to the user that it was doing something, because it was completely silent.