MacBook Pro and MacBook Air are both fine choices.
Traditionally, the MacBook Pro has higher-end features and capabilities and better displays, while the MacBook Air design focuses more on portability. The former can be larger and heavier.
Here is a comparison tool: Mac - Compare Models - Apple
If you're not planning on doing image rendering or video-transcoding or compute-intensive computing, or intensive app development and compilations, the lower-spec Apple silicon processors (M1, M2) will do just fine in either MacBook Pro or MacBook Air. If you're a heavy user of Adobe products or of Apple Xcode or such, you'll probably want at least a mid-range processor. For the more resource-intensive apps, they'll usually have a published minimum and recommended configuration posted somewhere.
If you need two or more external displays, you'll need the Pro or Max versions of the processors. Base M1 and M2 processors support one external display on the laptops, plus the built-in display. Upper-end M1 and M2 models support more external displays.
Generally... I'd go for 16 GB memory, and with more internal storage than you think you'll need over the lifetime of the Mac. This as macOS, apps, and particularly my own data is not getting any smaller. And as memory and storage cannot be upgraded.
Factor in the cost to purchase of either a hard disk with a capacity of two or three times the aggregate internal storage (and any external storage routinely connected) for your Time Machine backups, or the cost of network attached storage with Time Machine support of sufficient capacity if you want wireless backups, too.
