As an aside, if you use Sound Control to EQ the speakers, you can in fact get them to sound even louder, with even more bass.
It looks like Apple dialed the speakers back quite a lot to make sure they don't drain battery like crazy. But once you have applied EQ, the 15" Air can add some serious body to your tunes.
Anyway, yeah, I've really enjoyed my 15" Air as well. It has been an excellent workhorse for my 3D modeling, photo editing, AI, coding, and general book-keeping and documentation tasks. The battery life and weight have been highlights to me. It's finally a sub-4lbs 15" laptop from Apple that is competitive with the competition in size and weight, and it lasts basically forever while doing the tasks I mentioned above.
My workflow on the 16" Intel Pro machine barely allows it to last 2-3 hours now. 3D modeling is very taxing supposedly, but M2 has been able to eat it up easily, even when I connect an external 5K display and force it to work with my models at that resolution.