Well, I always thought the 8GB Air is just not made for tasks that put pressure on the chip for a longer period of time. There are people out there that actually get things done but this is in fact a consumer not a professional laptop. I made the "mistake" myself before buying an Intel Air for, which I thought, lighter tasks in Adobe CC that just couldn’t stand up the tasks. Sure Apple Silicon can handle it better but still not as good as a MacBook from the Pro series.
For monitoring your temperatures you should look into TGPro ... this is awesome to actually see the temps of pretty much all of the components of your Mac.