I don't have a medium account so I can only see the first paragraph ish, but I will comment that I used to daily drive a thinkpad T440p that I bought off ebay for ~$140, and ran arch linux on it. I was living the dream every article or think-piece like this seems to believe in. I now (for a laptop) use an M1 pro macbook pro.
The reason why I was open to buying a new laptop at all is because I had gotten used to watching youtube videos at 2x speed, and it literally couldn't handle it. The video would freeze and the audio would keep going and the only fix was to refresh the page multiple times per video.
I recently went on a week long trip, and needed a linux laptop, so I brought it with me, and was working on an OpenGL project. Practically every time I hit compile, the entire X session would freeze, to the point where the clock in the KDE taskbar wasn't even updating anymore, and the only fix was to hard reset the machine (I have never gotten magic sysreq working on that computer). I now have a framework 16 on preorder to be my linux laptop.
I also never got the webcam to be detected by linux (looking in lsusb, lspci, etc) even though it was enabled in the bios, the battery life wasn't enough to make it through a day of classes on one charge, and it ran too hot to be comfortable on my lap.
To its credit, the keyboard was nice, the trackpoint was fine, and when the trackpad died entirely, I was able to buy a new one (also on ebay) and swap them out without issue. With an SSD, it boots very quickly. That's about where my good things to say end.
"Just buy a used laptop from over a decade ago" is not good advice. Operating systems, the apps we use, the websites we use, are no longer optimized for a 10 year old dual core with 10 year old intel HD graphics. You're better off saving that money to buy something newer.
It's definitely good advice to be mindful of one's needs. I have my own personal anecdotes about getting burnt by underestimating my actual needs when attempting projects like daily driving an older laptop.
At the same time, keep in mind that the biggest tradeoff tends to be convenience. For example, a YouTube script plus local video player, such as MPV, works a treat on these older machines. Even if some video formats don't work great, you a) actually have an option for converting [0], and b) you are dropping all of the cycles spent on the non-video-watching parts of a YouTube video page.
Yes, that tends to make watching a 10 minute video kind of annoying when you spend a minute or two just on the overhead of downloading/opening/deleting it. Personally, I've sometimes found that to be a subtle push to read more text-based content instead of watching a bunch of videos. Similarly, it pushes me to favor longer-form videos that might involve more information and/or subtleties that the shorter videos might skip over (perhaps largely for SEO reasons).
All of that might or might not be a net-positive or even a possibility depending on needs, of course.
I've found a lot of personal motivation and fulfillment by looking for those sorts of alternate ways of doing things. Sometimes, slowing down (in more ways than just FLOPS) can lead you down rabbit holes that are not only fulfilling and interesting, but educational. [1]
Your point that it's bad advice to "just buy an [old] used laptop" definitely stands, but I'll just amend it with the caveat of "... depending on your needs/uses". To each their own.
[0]: There are also in-browser tricks/plugins for making the YouTube site itself lighter, but personally, I find throwing more instructions into the browser to be somewhat counterproductive. A bit like calculating how much extra fuel you need in order to carry the additional fuel, etc. The tradeoff is convenience, of course.
[1]: I'm also lucky to no longer have to deal with things like customers breathing down my neck with deadlines. So if I spend an extra 5 minutes doing something that used to take me 2 minutes, that's fine.
The reason why I was open to buying a new laptop at all is because I had gotten used to watching youtube videos at 2x speed, and it literally couldn't handle it. The video would freeze and the audio would keep going and the only fix was to refresh the page multiple times per video.
I recently went on a week long trip, and needed a linux laptop, so I brought it with me, and was working on an OpenGL project. Practically every time I hit compile, the entire X session would freeze, to the point where the clock in the KDE taskbar wasn't even updating anymore, and the only fix was to hard reset the machine (I have never gotten magic sysreq working on that computer). I now have a framework 16 on preorder to be my linux laptop.
I also never got the webcam to be detected by linux (looking in lsusb, lspci, etc) even though it was enabled in the bios, the battery life wasn't enough to make it through a day of classes on one charge, and it ran too hot to be comfortable on my lap.
To its credit, the keyboard was nice, the trackpoint was fine, and when the trackpad died entirely, I was able to buy a new one (also on ebay) and swap them out without issue. With an SSD, it boots very quickly. That's about where my good things to say end.
"Just buy a used laptop from over a decade ago" is not good advice. Operating systems, the apps we use, the websites we use, are no longer optimized for a 10 year old dual core with 10 year old intel HD graphics. You're better off saving that money to buy something newer.