This is probably way too late to be helpful to the OP, but others may also have this question.
I can't speak to the Macbook, but a couple months ago, I switched from a 2014 vintage iMac to a maxed-out M1 iMac and, as you might expect, the difference was night and day.
EU4 was actually perfectly fine on the 2014 iMac, but CKIII was so slow as to be unplayable, HOI4 was fine until combat started at which point it too bogged down into unplayability, and Imperator crashed constantly (note: the 2014 iMac did not meet the minimum system requirements for any Paradox game -- it's more surprising that EU4 and Stellaris ran perfectly than that the others didn't!).
They are all blazingly fast on the M1 -- so much so that I'm playing at much slower game speeds than I used to and still having to pause a lot more -- and, although I've played it way less than CKIII and Stellaris, Imperator hasn't crashed on me once so far. Again, this is an iMac with 16 GB of memory, so performance may or may not mirror what you get with your air. But, even if your performance doesn't quite match mine, it should still be more than sufficient to run any Paradox game well.
