Incidentally, Howard Oakley today had a nice little MA summary and he linked to this Apple doc. Apparently, in modern macOS MA will always use wifi rather than any wired TB or Gigabit connection when it does direct Mac to Mac migration. I’ll make sure to migrate from a blazing fast NVMe flash clone next time then.
He later added a correction to the article:
Apple’s support note is incorrect about migration only using Wi-Fi connections to another Mac. This should work as it always has, and select the fastest connection between them, which could include back-to-back Thunderbolt.
I’m highly skeptical of that based on my own experience. Apple’s note is clear.
The steps in this article describe how to transfer content from one Mac to another Mac over Wi-Fi.
You may well be correct, and Howard’s source may be mistaken. My only recent use of MA under Sequoia was via a Time Machine backup on an external drive, not a direct Mac-to-Mac transfer.
It might be worth disabling wi-fi to see if MA works with TB or GbE. At the risk of being pedantic, while the support note describes using Wi-Fi for MA, it is silent about other methods, like TB or GbE.
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This is why I’ve not considered a MacBook Air since they removed the SD card slot from the new design. I consider that slot almost essential for me as future-proofing against running out of internal storage. It certainly came in useful for that purpose on my old 2013 MacBook Air.
The plot thickens. Somebody has now suggested that MA would force wifi only on initial setup, but that it will indeed use a provided TB connection if you migrate after setup. And Howard seems to suggest that it might even say wifi and still use a wired TB connection if provided. You’d think this should just be a simple matter of looking up the documentation. 
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I bought a 14" M4 Pro MBP. While I could’ve waited another year or two, my M1 Pro MBP had a flaky HDMI port and two of the arrow keys felt wonky, so I used that as an excuse to upgrade. I don’t really need the performance of an M4 Pro, but when I configured the low-end MBP similarly, the price was about the same. After trade in, the upgrade cost “only” $1000.
I don’t use Migration Assistant when upgrading to a new computer. I like to take the opportunity to clean out the cruft that accumulates over the years. Much of my data lives on iCloud Drive, so I didn’t need to move that stuff over by hand. I mostly had to copy over a few directories in my home folder, which went really fast thanks to the Thunderbolt connection, and reinstall the apps.
The system does feel noticeably snappier.