If Apple continues down the path of including more Liquid Glass eye-candy in the future, having the additional GPU cores and faster SSD that come with the M5 Pro vs base M5, will keep the OS and apps from feeling sluggish for a lot longer. Tahoe on my 2019 16” Intel MBP (with top end 5500M GPU with 8GB VRAM) routinely felt sluggish in terms of just populating icons in finder, the various Liquid Glass animations stuttering because it just couldn’t render the user interface fast enough (it’s also unlikely Apple spent much time trying to optimize it for Intel). At any rate, everything in Tahoe looks smooth on my M5 Pro. Also the 120Hz ProMotion display on the MBP helps keep the OS look and feel fluid and smooth.
I think you’ll do quite well for the next 5-10yrs (or until Apple stops supporting the M5 well into the future) with an M5 Pro given your uses.
