It's Apple Silicon, the fans will never turn on so you'll never have to hear them anyways.
The 15" Air also doesn't have a 3rd USB C port, so no difference there. You do still give up the HDMI though (how is a port a "distraction" anyways? Distraction from what?).
The equivalent Air is just $100 less, and for that you get a screen that's worse in literally every way except size, less battery life, worse speakers, worse mics, worse Wifi, fewer ports, a worse processor of course... and it weighs only 0.1 lbs less which is negligible. Unless you absolutely MUST have that extra inch of screen real estate, there are zero redeeming qualities of anything but the lowest-end 15" Air anymore. And even for the screen size, since the 14" Pro has such a higher resolution than the 15" Air, if you want more screen real estate on a 14" you can simply upscale and the image should be perfectly readable.
I'm basically the target market for the 15" Air (love large screens, don't need much power (but do want a step up from base RAM+SSD)), but damn, Apple sure did everything they could to make it as uncompetitive as possible just 4 months after release!