Hello @glowbox, thank you for your post and welcome to the forum:)
At the moment some users seem to have difficulties with Illustrator on M1 in particular.
For example here’s one of the threads discussing this:
We’re trying to figure out what the reason for this may be, as plugins for other CC apps seem to work just fine.
Automatic activation for CC apps would also only be available with the subscription, not the base version.
Hope this helps,
Yuriy
FontBase Dev Team