Just wanted to update this thread with my latest findings.
After updating to big sur 11.5.1 and xcode 12.5.1 the graphical glitches that were happening in the default third person template are now gone. It renders the default third person template map and my personal project fine with no issues whatsoever. In addition to this the crashing/freezing that I was encountering every 5-10 minutes seems to have also been resolved! Very good news, I haven’t done a full day of development on it but it seems that you could now safely use a m1 mac for unreal dev.