My 4 years old work windows laptop is a dell xp13 with an i7-8something cpu and is more than enough for anyone who was ok with that laptop when it came out.
Which is not to say the m2 isn't awesome, but since bazillion core cpu and nvme drives became commonplace there isn't much beside very heavy usage (gaming, ia, ... anything that require a top level gpu) that can stop an "old" computer, even a laptop.
But I easily could've kept using it for another several years for all but the most demanding software and it was an i7-3770k/16gb/GTX980/various SSDs/HDDs.
Still, I understand that the form factor meant that portability wasn't an issue. The difference between a 10yo laptop and a modern one would've been much, much more noticeable.
Unfortunately Apple followed up with some missteps like the awful "butterfly" keyboard, and the unpopular touch bar which initially removed a physical ESC key.
I still have the scars: I no longer use a Caps Lock key, even on my newer computers — it’s permanently mapped to ESC…