Yep, this is another reason I've needed the use of x86-64 images, as although they should be technically the same when rebuilt for ARM, they aren't always, so using the same architecture image which is run in production, will sometimes catch edge case bugs the ARM version doesn't. Admittedly it's not common, but I have had it happen. Obviously there is also the argument that the x86-64 image is being translated, so isn't the same as production anyway, but I've found that to have far less bugs than the different architecture

> Obviously there is also the argument that the x86-64 image is being translated, so isn't the same as production anyway

I've never seen this make a practical difference. I'm sure you can spot differences if you look for them (particularly at the hardware interface level) but qemu has done this for decades and so has apple.