I assume I'll use emacs as long as I continue to use computers, and it's been decades since I thought editors really should be written in assembler, but this:

"I use an underpowered MacBook Air from around 2019"

and this:

"Mac M1 with 64GB of RAM and 10 CPU cores, everything feels lightweight"

are insane sentiments to express, and it's an insane world that makes those thoughts seem agreeable to anyone.

There is zero justification to consider a 2019 Air "underpowered" for this task. There is zero justification to consider that of course one needs an obscenely powerful portable supercomputer for this task.

IDEs do a lot. They do NOT do enough to justify this insanity.

I'm sure there's an element of people not knowing what's been lost, and an element of people not understanding just how inconceivably fast computers are today, but it's hard to wrap the brain around anyone tolerating this (as customers, as purchasers, as users).

Perhaps the same sort of jaw-drop that occurs when someone takes a naive python app to go or rust and discovers that python is in fact actually really slow (whether or not it's "fast enough")?

Get off my porch, whippersnappers, etc etc.