I bought my M2 13” air and it arrived 3 days before the announcements of the M3s - I got 256gb and 24gb of RAM - I work on a machine all day as a super geek so the last thing I want to do is turn on my own laptop, I gave my dad my 2017 MacBook Pro and I upgraded to the M2 - I will say the RAM upgrade makes a world of difference because oof how Apple uses RAM, but my as for the Storage, on the 256 NAND chip, I am still getting 1700MBps to even 2100MBps on smaller files which is nothing to complain about - yes the 512gb is faster because because it’s splits the storage into 2 NAND chips vs 1 so your performance is better because the workload is split - but 1700MBps is plenty fast for me - the RAM you cannot upgrade later so I maxed that out and I bought a 2tb NVME drive and a thunderbolt 4 enclosure (not cheap but worth it) and I get 3400MBps of write speeds to it and I can game or video edit off of that drive without an issue - I debated returning it for the M3s or even the M1 Pro model but I hardly use it for some network troubleshooting or some basic web browsing, so it made no sense to me - form my I7 to the M2, I hands down love this thing and I would say keep the M2 (providing you have enough RAM) that’s the only thing I will always suggest is more RAM because it can’t be upgraded later
Hope that helps a bit
Stage manager, either top right of the task bar “control center” and click it to turn it off or go to system settings somewhere and turn it off, search “state manager”