I think this mostly only holds if you use local compute in a portable form factor.

Most of my personal development these days is done on my home server - 9995wx, 768GB, rtx 6000 pro blackwell GPU in headless mode. My work development happens in a cloud workstation with 64 cores and 128GB of ram but builds are distributed and I can dial up the box size on demand for heavier development.

I use laptops practically entirely as network client devices. Browser, terminal window, perhaps a VS Code based IDE with a remote connection to my code. Tailscale on my personal laptop to work anywhere.

I'm not limited by local compute, my devices are lightweight, cheap(ish) and replaceable, not an investment.

I'd like to use this kind of setup but unfortunately every time I try there's just soo many annoying edge cases that are wasting my time. Especially when I need to do FE/Mobile - but even BE has gotchas. I guess it depends on your environment - I'll try making this setup work sometimes in the next few months again.