And a second hand Chromebook is cheaper than the new Chromebook price point. I guess you could then suggest stealing a non Chromebook laptop as a "better deal" to support a specious argument.

But you don't get the minimalist Chromebook keyboard.

Plus laptop CPU thermal management has a lot of problems. I would prefer a modern and fanless Chromebook to an old laptop where the fans are whirring away the whole time for no evidence of performance gain.

I am hoping that there will soon be an eight generation Pentium inside a high end Chromebook with that Chromebook running linux things like a web server natively. No idea how the IDE is going to work running that way but that is where I would like my dev environment to be going.

You can still get refurbished Chromebooks, I bought a Dell one and I think that come the apocalypse there will be cockroaches and my Dell Chromebook running, if nothing else, as it is that indestructible. Plus charging seems optional. It goes for days.