A coworker just complained literally yesterday about her 5yo laptop, although it was mainly because the battery's clapped out. But my experience aligns: even a decent may have crap in the air channels and throttles due to heat, or OS upgrades making it run worse than it did (also an infamous problem with phones; my old pocket PC got destroyed by Windows CE 5, and my last phone, a Galaxy A35, ran pretty fast until the Android 16 upgrade, which murdered it.)
To be fair Apple is famous for updates made to purposely throttle old chips. lol
BUT people switching today may not know that.