For various reasons but mainly because I so rarely use laptops, I have a crappy laptop from ca. 2010. It's slow, with a spinning-rust hard disk and an Intel Celeron from its day; it's a miracle it even allowed up to a 4GB RAM upgrade. With a GPU that can barely manage to process a 1366x768 framebuffer needed for the built-in screen, it's an unpleasant experience all around. By all means it's the definition of crappy laptop and that held even when the thing was new.
All the same, it has no problem running Debian 11, and both the newest Chromium and Firefox can at least launch on it. It does take half a minute for the browser windows to actually appear, but it works, more or less. The per-site experience after this depends heavily on how much "cool tech" web site developers have opted to use. YouTube is practically unusable even in the tiny video window it displays and 360p videos. Hacker News is perfectly fine.
Perhaps bias on my own part, but I would argue that this case is the crappy laptop that's reasonable to optimize for. It may not be pleasant, but for large classes of web sites, it should be bearable to some extent. I'm pretty sure both the Chromebook and iPad mentioned in the article have better hardware specs than my thing, but they're both made by companies that are far too willing to drop support after a short period, leaving users in an insecure status and many of them just don't know why web sites stop working.