For a company that has no specialized team for distro development, partnering with System76 was probably a really good idea.
Also, people who think this laptop is just fine (I don't need more than 16G of memory, and HD is fine for me too) have little to comment about, or the only comment they really have "hey, looks cool!"; which are kind of the unsubstantive comments HN discourages. So by and large, those people won't comment. But people who do have something they want to see better do have substantive things (or rants...) to post about the keyboard, screen, memory, or whatnot, so they will post them.
In short, you're 1) seeing a very biased view of what people think, and 2) HN is not a "hive mind" where everyone agrees.
I now understood why the manufactures doesn't really seems to care for this segment, as everyone seems to have enough dealbreakers that nothing's going to sell well.
my lemur with 1tb/16gb ram ended up costing around 2k I think
If somebody came out today with a machine with 2GB of RAM, a 1024x600 display, and a 128GB SSD; we'd all agree that that's not a developer machine. So what's the minimum for you?
With that said, there are many caveats. The most glaring is that developer needs inevitably vary depending on the project and tooling requirements. For example, at my current day job, the computer I physically use is primarily a gateway to other, more powerful computers and systems.
Doing anything at real scale leads to the eventuality that the world can't fit on and be run from a single notebook sized / spec'd machine.
My comment in this case was triggered more by the way op phrased and presented their needy needs, I interpreted it as unreasonably narrow and selfishly entitled. I've encountered enough, neigh too many odd ducks IRL who come across this way and experientially, they've been "Homer Car" types every single time.
That's somewhat fair, but I did only have two criticisms, so I don't think I quite fit the homer car stereotype (although give it a few decades, and I'm sure I'll be "old man [yelling] at cloud") The rest... I couldn't critique, because we don't really have a solid spec.
Right now I'm using a laptop with 16GB of soldered on RAM; it's not the upgradability there that really concerned me, but rather the fact that they advertised 16GB as a solid selling point. 16GB these days, while respectable, isn't an impressive number. Advertising it as your base, without mentioning upgradability, seems a little out of touch. I don't use much memory myself, I'm a VIM user, and I avoid anything overly heavy, but I have colleagues who could make could use of that RAM.
As for the screen, that does come down to preference, to an extent. But, it's 2022, why has screen quality stagnated at FHD? HiDPI should have been standard half a decade ago.