I use an M2 air with 16GB RAM for a very similar workload all day every day. It is more than capable, and thermal throttling is not an issue for those tasks which are not CPU or GPU heavy at all. a Pro is absolutely not necessary unless you need to hook up to multiple monitors (air is limited to 1 external display) or you really need the various physical ports that the pro has.
I suspect anyone saying “just get a pro if it’s for work” or “you need a fan with that much going on” has not actually used an Air or know how powerful and efficient they are. It’s 100% wrong.
In this screenshot I had been streaming a 14mbps 4k video and doing a 1080p screen recording in OBS for about 30 minutes. You can see the CPU is still about 60% idle. The case is warm (expected because it acts as a heat sink), but it’s nowhere near the point where you’d need to worry about thermal throttling. It’s doing its job dissipating heat for this workload, and the system has remained perfectly responsive while doing other tasks.