You don't need a modern computer

After spilling an entire Monster energy drink onto my new M1 MacBook Air I had to revert back to using my old MacBook Pro from 2012 for a while. Although it was mostly usable I was surprised how bad it was for web browsing. Very laggy scrolling, resizing, delayed keyboard input, pages constantly force reloading, etc. Though once my expectations were lowered I was able to adapt to it. When using a slower computer you just have to be more deliberate and thoughtfu to minimize unnecessary performance impacting actions. Overall it was good enough that I didn't rush out to fix or replace my broken computer for several months.

I have never understood the logic for software developers to use high end hardware.

Personally, I tend toward the opposite for business software development. If my software runs fine on my trailing edge development machine, I'm confident it will run well on the latest and greatest higher end stuff.

I currently use a Celeron J4105 cpu with 4GB DDR4 RAM as my main development box.