> the amount of leverage you get out of a better model dwarfs the leverage you get out of a better laptop

To some degree, yes. But 'dwarfs' isn't really the term I would use. It is a bit slower, but the upsides are >> than the downsides for me. Not having Sam, Dario or Xi's minions looking over my shoulder matters to me more than any technological edge.

> Also... employment in some parts of the stack is genuinely going away. I don't even look at CSS anymore.

Yes, that's a fact, but that's orthogonal. I haven't touched either HTML or CSS in a long time now and yet I've cobbled together (I wouldn't claim ownership) a lot of stuff that 'just works'. I also would not expose that stuff to the world at large because I suspect it isn't nearly as secure as it looks.