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If you're doing advanced compute work (including lock-free data structures), then it's best effort.

https://github.com/linebender/vello/issues/42 is an issue from when Vello (then piet-gpu) had a single-pass prefix sum algorithm. Looking back, I'm fairly confident that it's a shader translation issue and that it wouldn't work with MoltenVK either, but we stopped investigating when we moved to a more robustly portable approach.

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So in general, am I right in assuming that any advanced compute work would be a no-go on Apple Silicon?

I am working on a 3D SDF renderer for games (fully compute driven), and my older PC is starting to croak. I was thinking of going Mac Studio 2, but if their GPU doesn't support memory barriers and such (even though I am not using them yet), I guess it's not worth the risk?

It really depends on your workload. Prefix sum is pretty important, but you can also work around the missing barrier by doing extra dispatches. You'll want to do that if your goal is portable code. Metal also has some nice things, including real pointers (available in Vulkan 1.3 but not earlier versions, and not in HLSL).