Yep same. I wanted a cheap decent laptop for when I'm traveling, which isn't often, so didn't want or need best of the best. It dawned on me I spend about all my time on the web, in vs code, or on the command line. With their Linux VM setup I can install about anything, and it both installs and runs as if it were a native app. Perfect for my use case, at least.
I'm not a huge fan of the ChromeOS UI and whatnot, but spend very little time interacting with it or Gnome on my main machine, so it's fine enough.