I don't think either of us is the target audience here. I can see a "cheaper" (questionable) Pro laptop being useful for students going into college with a limited budget. An undergrad CS/graphic design degree shouldn't tax an 8gb machine too much, assuming students shut down everything else when doing their once-a-semester major rendering/compiling/model training. If people just want Macbook pro software with more ports, a "cheaper" machine is better than none. Personally, I would still get a used/refurbished machine though.

That being said, my current laptop workload tends to be emacs, qpdfview, Firefox, and tmux on EL9. For the remaining stuff, I usually just spin up a VM then ssh/xrdp into it. As for slack, teams, jabber, etc, I'm happy to report I've been out of industry/IT for 1+ years and don't plan on going back anytime soon. For all I care, Apple can call their models unicorn edition. As long as it sells it's not stupid.